Pre-Trip Planning
Choosing where to go when you can go anywhere
When we first started embarking on a plan for taking a mini-retirement, we naturally started considering where we might go.
The first plan that emerged was a tour around South America. It’s a continent I’ve never been to, contained a number of “top tier” destinations we want to visit, and would pair well with a Dec-Feb trip timeframe—which is one we often struggle to fill. That’d also allow us to divide vacation time into two calendar years, making things much easier. We could also do it rather cheaply.
A little while later, Jen put together another option of bouncing around the Balkans instead. It’d be more expensive, but would be better timed for the late spring. It also seemed a bit more strategic because it’s easier to travel from Arizona to South America than across many timezones to Europe. So perhaps we should save various South America destinations for “normal” trips instead.
Of course, this was all just theoretical conversation; several factors would have to align to make a trip possible. We wouldn’t be able to entertain any substantial time away until my dad passed away. And then Jen would still need to convince her bosses to let her take an extended leave of absence, a very rare event. To our surprise, both of those factors recently aligned. So the destination discussions got real, quite quickly.
Where do you go if you can go anywhere in the world? It’s not a common question to think about. Dream about? Sure. Seriously consider? Not really.
But suddenly, it was a question we’d have to actually answer. (And believe me, I am NOT complaining!)
When we calculated out the specific days and discovered that the time off would be exactly 100 days, the answer seemed obvious. Wouldn’t it be epic to visit all seven continents in 100 days? Wow! 7 in 100. That would be a story I’d never get tired of telling. So we put together a trip that would do that. Jen has already visited each continent, but I have only been to Europe and North America. It’d be quite a bit more expensive than the other two options we had plotted out, but it’d be worth it. 7 Continents in 100 Days! How cool is that? We nearly pulled the trigger.
But we decided it was smart to chew on it for another night first before booking. We went to happy hour at a local brewery the next day and stepped back a bit to ask a bigger question: “what did we really want from this trip?”
Jen’s answers were different than mine. She’s more than half way through her career, with a dozen years remaining before retirement. She’s incredibly burned out and needs a big break from work. And she’s excited to see as many new things as possible. She wants to make a lot of progress on her quest to see all the countries of the world. She wants lots of new experiences. That’s what would really re-energize her.
And it was suddenly immediately clear. We needed to ditch the seven continents plan and focus primarily on the countries it would be logistically difficult to visit during our usual 2-ish week vacation window, given their distance from home. We should shoot for the antipode—the places on the far side of the globe.
We might not hit as many of those top “bucket list” destinations, but we’d set ourselves up for easier international trips in the coming years.
We’ll have an amazing time no matter where we end up. I mean, we once let the internet choose our road trip destination and we still managed to have a fun time at the winning entry, the (not so illustrious) International Banana Museum. So it doesn’t really matter where we go.