I truly and deeply love planning travel. My itineraries are pages long with links, photos, and weather forecasts. I’ll look up meal options and plan most of the days. Travel days are especially thoroughly planned with maps, travel methods with time and cost estimates, and packing tips. There’s a few reasons for this: I’m a planner and organizer so I like my lists, I’m a worrier so I like my backup plans, and I’m a dreamer so I like to create my ideal version of the trip. Sometimes, the itinerary isn’t followed exactly and that’s okay. Sometimes, I create an itinerary with multiple choice options so we can decide what feels best in the moment. But, for me, the trip comes alive in the planning and in the detailed organizing. My imagination doesn’t work well in pictures, but it does work well in words and concepts. Reading about an experience like walking around the Seljalandsfoss waterfall in Iceland is more vivid to me than seeing a picture, and writing about that experience is more impact to my memory than looking at the photos I took when I experienced it.

 Currently, I’m planning a trip to New Orleans with my best friend and I’m finding so much joy in the planning. I love research the different food options, the different activities that we can do, the ways we can travel, and the different places we can stay. There’s so much opportunity! We could build so many different kinds of trips! The world is our oyster and we can create anything we can imagine! This is one of the best times in trip planning for me, nothing has been decided yet so everything can be considered and contemplated. Do we want to take a train back? Would we like to take a swamp tour? How about a Jazz Dinner cruise? It’s all so exciting and we could do so much!

 Last year, my husband and I took a trip to several state parks – it was a boggling journey of 1,090 (ish) miles and about 4-5 parks that everyone has given a little bit of a “are you crazy” look to when I tell them about it. I planned our driving with time and mile estimates, optional activities and food places, links to our planned activities, and weather forecasts. The final document was about 2-3 pages long, the work of several hours, and a great joy to make. I loved it, and my husband’s eyes glazed over when he looked at it because too much detailed planning isn’t how his brain likes to work. He’s happy to go with my plans and happy he didn’t have to make them, but doesn’t understand why I feel the desire to make them so detailed.

 I’ve loosely planned a hundred trips – looking up flights, weekend itineraries, browsing Pinterest and Google Flights. The explore tab on Google Flights can keep my attention for hours as I look at the cheapest flights from my area, and then explore what there is to do in those areas. My top travel wishlist? Iceland (for the second time), Quebec City (where we were suppose to honeymoon until CoVid), and anywhere that happens to sound fun when I’m deciding where to travel next. The planning is a joy all on it’s own for me, and I look forward to planning many more trips than I can afford to take.