Greg and I are going analog.
That’s right, I am becoming old and resisting change… I want to feel paper in my hand… I want the thing to be real and not stored in some cloud I don’t understand. Especially, when it comes to the thing we love the most, which is planning our next adventures.
In the past few weeks, we bought some notebooks and started taking all of our google doc lists and putting them on paper.
The exercise reminded me how much I love planning trips and explorations with my husband.
When we first started dating, we made lists. Lists for every epic season and all the hikes, festivals, and places we wanted to take on that season. And we lived up to those lists. So much beer and wine was drunk because if a beerfest made the list, we went.
Our Travel Lists Have Evolved
We still do the seasonal lists, but now we do lifetime travel lists.
Our most recent switch to notebooks caused us to reorganize how we catalog the travel we want to do. Each page in the notebook has a category: national parks, remote and challenging, Utah desert, big hikes, wine, Europe etc.
We will be creating a key of sorts to help us prioritize those.
…to indicate trips we want to take before West is in school aka travel in shoulder seasons.
….for places we want to go to before climate change alters them fundamentally.
….to help us sort and organize everything we want to do!
Trip Inspiration: Old Fashioned Guide Books and Podcasts
The places captured on these lists have come from hundreds of sources and maps. It feels like we have all the Lonely Planet travel books organized around topics like food, wine, where to go when.
A lot of trip ideas stem from past exploration… Like a town we drove through on a roadtrip and we want to spend more time in it.
Greg listens to all the travel podcasts. Finding inspiration for a potential adventure is as much a hobby for us as the travel itself.
Some of it takes intention. Some of it is best left to whim. It’s all fun.
Last year we went to Glacier National Park to see the glaciers before they are gone. This fall we will tackle a trip that falls into the “big hikes” and “food” category as we travel to the Dolomites and Emilia Romagna.
Next year and the following we will lean into trips that are tagged with “the before West enters school” designation. The approach to planning doesn’t really matter I suppose, but putting it out there on paper, to the universe, has gotten us out there time and again.
