You know what I always find funny? When people feel like they need a vacation from their vacation. I find that it’s because people jam back their vacations (especially when they travel internationally) by trying to hit all the “must see” items because they feel like they should. That hasn’t been my philosophy, and I’ve had no regrets!
So, as a reminder, my hubs and I are both project managers – aka a family of spreadsheets! It comes into our vacation planning too – which some people may think is over the top. First, we brainstorm all the cities in a country we want to visit, then throw out ideas of what is popular to see there and what we would like to see. I tend to like to use travel books and note what each location is known for (particularly foodwise!). J (the hubs) likes to Google things. Then we put together a spreadsheet of timeline and decide priority of what we actually want to see.
The thing is, we don’t necessarily always choose to see everything a city’s known for if we don’t want to. We’ve found a lot of people try to cram a whole bunch of museum trips or other things because that’s what a city’s known for, but they’re always stressed. We plan maybe two major activities a day, then put some optional ones, if we feel like it. We also try not to schedule things so exactly that it gets stressful because we constantly have to watch the clock. The whole point of a vacation (in my mind) is being able to sleep in and take things easy without being on a schedule.
The other thing we love to do and have found it to be so helpful in having a relaxing vacation – we have “travel days”. What does that mean? If we’re traveling from city to city (via train, plane, or however else), then nothing else gets scheduled that day. This way, if things get delayed, we get lost, or anything, we won’t miss anything. It’s helped so much! We had a time in Italy where our train was delayed due to some issues for an hour or two. Others around us were so stressed and upset about missing things they scheduled. We just kicked back and enjoyed the scenery.
It works for us. A major part of it is we travel to experience the culture and food of a country – not just landmarks or “must sees”. We want to relax and explore at our leisure. We’ve skipped things because we decided it just takes too much time. We’ll pay to skip lines and such, because wasting hours in a line is precious during a 2-3 week vacation. It doesn’t work for everybody, but we’ve been happy and have had no regrets on any of our vacations!
Miuzing 