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We all travel differently depending on not only where we go, but also, who we go with. Travelling with your spouse on a honeymoon to Europe is different from traveling with your girlfriends to Newport for the weekend. Likewise, traveling with your adult children and their small children to Walt Disney World is a far different experience than if you traveled to Hawaii with your elderly parents.
This is why, for me, I often get just as much pleasure out of planning a trip as I do in taking the trip. Deciding what excursions to take; which hotel will be best; what to pack; where to eat and how to get there, are completely dependent on what the goal of the journey is. For a honeymoon, the goal of the trip is a getaway after the stress of a wedding in celebration of one another: Excursions should be minimal, the hotel comfortable, pajamas optional, room service amenable and travel to the destination as stress-free as possible. On the contrary, the goal of a girls’ trip is to experience something new with supportive friends: Excursions should be emotionally or physically challenging, a hotel with double beds, suitcases filled with cute PJs, restaurants with a wine list and carpooling with a planned music playlist. But what happens when the reason for a trip is not yet known?
My sisters and I enjoy traveling together. Although we live in different houses, states and with different people, we grew up together and manage to, after all of these years, find our travel groove in that we don’t mind sharing a bathroom or even (if its king sized) a bed. However, although we have been to places together with other people, In the past 10 years we have managed to take only one special trip together. It was a trip filled with so much laughter and wonderful memories that we knew we wanted another adventure soon.
But soon didn’t come quickly and then, just as we started to talk about it again, COVID hit. Finally, with the halt of any other separate and distractionary travels last summer, we realized that we absolutely needed to think about where we wanted to go next and shift our aspirations for a trip together into an action plan for an actual trip together. Allowing for a good long while for a return to travel normalcy, we set a goal for a domestic trip in the summer of 2022. We just needed to decide on where.
The United States is a vast and beautiful country, offering many locations for adventure and we seemed to stumble a bit in our decisiveness on a specific spot. Should we stay nearby and drive? Should we fly? South? West? What we needed was a unified reason for selecting a destination so that the rest of the planning would fall into place. This past spring, the reason came… During a movie night gathering, Mom, whose prognosis is not good, said she wished that she had seen the national parks out West…In the end, it will have taken three sisters two years to plan one trip. Wyoming! Wyoming!
Kathy Naumann, possessor of NATURALLY curly hair and the understanding that you can’t control everything!
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