The truth about travel
Who am I kidding, putting books like 1,000 Places to See Before You Die and the Eyewitness Travel Guide Austria on my holiday wish list?
Apparently, I am kidding my in-laws, who were nice enough to get me a few of the travel books off of my list. So I can devour them and plan and dream about traveling and seeing the world…
But really, I am kidding myself. Moneywise, student loans are kicking my butt. I don’t have a plethora of “paid holidays.” And after this last weekend, I am starting to hate air travel.
Steven and I are going to have to work out a very specific financial saving plan if we want to travel the way we do.
You know how some people are interested in things that totally disinterest you? Maybe sports, or knitting, or animals, or cars, or scrap-booking, or whatever… well, I think “travel” is my thing that I love to talk about, and may disinterest a lot of people. It is also my “I don’t understand why you don’t like this!” thing. I just love seeing new parts of the world and learning about other cultures. And it’s especially fun now that I have Steven as my travel companion!
Themocracy
Hey, I’m right there with you minus the whole asking for travel guides for Christmas bit. We come up with these big plans to see the world from watching stuff on the Travel Channel and Food Network (yes, believe it or not) and we really haven’t gone much of anywhere. The hope is that we’ll finally hit Europe after Katie’s grad school graduation.
I have a Places to See Before You Die day by day tear off calender. Currently it says the date is October 7, so somewhere along the way I lost interest. I did, however, save the pages that had places that looked really interesting.
We LOVE to travel and luckily both Scott and I have enough paid vacation days that it’s usually easy to take time off (slightly harder for me, sometimes, because I earn a certain amount of hours every pay period, and don’t get one big lump sum). At first he was slightly opposed to traveling to certain places, basically anywhere that wasn’t the US or Europe, but now he’s open to anything. Especially after seeing how expensive it is to travel in Europe! Our next big international trip will (hopefully!) be China and Japan. No clue when that will happen, but I can’t wait.
90% of the time I’m thinking of places to go, whom to travel with and when. Just last night the husband and I were “planning” are next trip. We also love to play the game, “if we received airline tickets to anywhere in the world, where would we go and why”. I could talk endlessly about traveling.
Oh I love travel and my grand goal is to get out of the country every other year. I would love to do it every year but with an adult job (with the standard vacation hours), it is a bit hard to do. I am a huge history buff too, so travel is really the only way to see the places I fall in love with while reading and researching. So what is on your list? I have quite a few places both stateside and abroad that I would like to visit: Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, Anchorage, Greece, Ireland, England, and Scotland. These are just the ones on the top of my list 🙂
while i like travel, i hate the getting there and getting home again. i wish i could just teleport or something!
I’ve been very lucky to see quite a bit of the world, but am always hungering to see more. Travel is like an addiction where there’s always “one more thing to see.”
My advice is to pick one place/area/region which really interests you and concentrate on it as a travel goal. All too often people simply put too much into their itinerary, and end up running themselves ragged going from place to place instead of actually spending time to enjoy where they’re at. 🙂
I feel the same way about traveling. I hope I have the financial means to even leave the country someday.
kapgar – I hope Katie graduates soon then 🙂
Jenniy – Ooo… I want that calendar. Isn’t it funny that we always think of Europe for traveling? I need to break out of that too.
Gina (Mannyed) – yet more proof that we would get along!
Felicia – I was totally living through you during your cruise last summer! On the top of our list now is Austria, Australia and Egypt. But I still would like to visit DC and a few other countries in Europe. And maybe India and Thailand… and a few places in the tropics… here I go…
sizzle – me too. Airports are the enemy now 🙁
Dave2 – I wish I could be you 🙁 Hee hee. You have great advice though – not to exhaust yourself. I think my next trip should focus on a country or region, rather than running from place to place. I have all of my life to travel! (Unless humans destroy the earth before I die. And in that case, I don’t 😉 )
Rachel – You will! Travel now while you can use student loan money for it like I did in college… ha ha ha