As they say, travelling broadens your horizon. You have time to reflect and question familiar patterns and procedures. This is also the case with Christiane and me. And after about two and a half months away from home, we have already seen some changes in perspective and insights.
My most important insight so far: Going on a holiday and travelling is not the same!
Yes, that may sound a bit strange to the people who stayed at home, most of them working, but it is different (at least from our point of view ?).
Last autumn we finally decided to quit our jobs and to just travel for a while. And even though we wanted to be as flexible as possible, we also wanted to make the most of our time and of course see as much as possible. That’s why I mainly drew on my experience from our two previous road trips to New Zealand. In New Zealand we visited each day another different and “perfect” place. That was a great experience to relax and unwind from work! Because of the many impressions our brain had no time to return to work. However, we didn’t process all of the impressions until later, when we were back home. It felt natural to me to do the planning of our first three road trips in Australia (Tasmania, Kangaroo Island and Adelaide to Sydney) in a similar way as I had planned the New Zealand trips.
But after almost 80 days on the road, I realized that we can’t keep up the pace of a “normal” holidays. I simply need some time to process our experiences.
However, it is not quite as simple as that to change the old, familiar patterns of behaviour. After all, you have to win the fight against FOMO – the fear of missing out. You always have in mind that you might visit this place only once in your life. So, what’s the harm to visit just one more point of interest, right? On the other hand it is inevitable that you will always miss something. And if travelling is really supposed to broaden the horizon, shouldn’t we deliberately take some time so that we are able to process our experiences and to reflect?
In addition, we don’t want to use our eight months to just travel and be on the road. There are many things for which we often just didn’t have the time previously and which are now on our daily to-do list. We want to have nice talks with other travellers next to us, read books, write for our blog and we both started to learn another foreign language: Spanish ☺️.
So it’s time to slow down a bit and start travelling properly. Less is more… this is not a holiday-sprint, it’s a travel-marathon.
