I recently returned from a short trip to Slovenia and Venice. This trip was not on any sort of plan for the year. I learned in late spring that my running buddy hoped to travel in Slovenia after doing a teaching fellowship in Germany. So I offered to tag along. I am in the happy place in life where I have the ability to travel (flexible job! No nursing babies!) and so I try to seize opportunities as they come up. This includes professional opportunities. Last year I gave a speech in Portugal — a country that was on my bucket list — and later this summer I’ll be speaking in another fairly adventurous location (more on that soon!). I tend not to know about these until just a few months before.
However I do still think it’s helpful to create a fairly-near-term travel wish list. It’s hard to know what life will look like in 20 years. But I have a good sense of what the next year (8,760 hours) will look like, and a reasonable sense of what the next 5 years will look like. At least for the next 5 years, most family travel will need to happen over Christmas, over spring break (though that might not involve the college kids), and over summer. If I want to take trips without my family, they will probably be on the shorter side. I can even speculate on some other sorts of trips — most likely my church choir will do two more tours by the end of summer 2031, and these tend to happen in the summer.
Thinking about these parameters can help refine which trips might be possible, and which to start planning for. Life is never certain but even when plans don’t happen they help us figure out what we want to do, and often enable us to quickly pivot if need be. My trip to Slovenia was also a reminder of how straightforward even international travel is these days! You get on a flight in Philadelphia, wake up in Venice, and take a car service to Ljubljana. So much of the world is accessible in just a short time. And then a week later you’re home, not really the worse for wear, and you have many more memories than if you’d stayed put.
So what’s on your 5-year travel plan? Longtime readers know I’m superstitious about posting details of trips that are booked and planned before they happen. So I’ll be vague on the next year, for which I already have several reservations (only to note that I hope to cross two more long-time entries off my bucket list)! But here are some places I hope to visit in the next 2-5 years.
Germany. Either the Christmas markets or an Octoberfest type thing, though I’ll take summer as well. I would like to see Leipzig and hear a Bach performance there. I like the idea of making it to Europe in June every year, so maybe this will be part of a future trip.
Greece. I’m not that big on boats, and my husband wants to take a boat trip through Greece so we’ll see how this winds up playing out. But I do love Greek food! Anywhere around the Mediterranean for seafood sounds amazing. (I spent a week in Cinque Terra in Italy many years ago and it was fabulous.)
The 8 states I haven’t visited. Arkansas (I want to see the Crystal Bridges museum), Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, North Dakota (maybe Theodore Roosevelt National Park), and Alaska.
