Letting my imagination travel

The year is 2020 and I have had 5 holidays cancelled due to the global issue that I will not name - you know what I’m talking about. Of all the fallout, I feel the loss of my freedom most keenly, and the loss I am grieving most of all is my inability to travel to other places.

I’m not a travel blogger - I don’t do this for any kind of living - so my loss here is in no way related to work or income. My travel is just holidays that are interspersed throughout my working year but I plan them with fervour, I research them with rigour, and I place great emphasis on their contribution to my general enjoyment of life. Trite though it may sound, its one of the reasons I go to work, to afford myself this ‘hobby’, and to be able to see the world and fill up my memory bank with a vast array of different experiences.

I miss the new sights, smells, tastes, activities, views, challenges, languages, music, food, customs, ideas, landscapes, sounds……and even before I have gone away, I miss the feeling inside of me when I’m researching and planning my trips - the hope, the anticipation, the excitement, the intrigue. Both the run-up and the actual event are part of the story of why I love to travel and why it infuses my life with joy.

I have pretty much spent the last 6 months grieving all these losses, but after my final trip bit the dust (7 nights in the first week of October, to be spent mountain biking in the Dolomites for my boyfriend’s 40th birthday) I felt I needed to switch my mindset away from focusing on all the things I can’t do, and instead thinking about what I can do.

My style of travel is independent travel - by this, I mean not that I travel solo (we tend to travel as a couple), but that I research and book each part myself to create custom itineraries for us and I use packages or tours created for me only infrequently, often part of a larger independent itinerary. I have realised that one thing I can continue to do, is this: the travel planning. I enjoy the researching part of the process almost as much as I enjoy the travelling itself, so why not.

There are no restrictions on my imagination so I can travel in my mind. I can lose myself in the creation of hypothetical holidays and itineraries, get deep and creative through extensive research, escape into digging out the hidden gems, derive satisfaction out of refining the high-level ideas into detailed designs for trips that meet our personal preferences. As an extra bonus, I should end up with a store of fairly complete holiday options for when I can travel again.

To round off the activity, once I feel I have a fairly complete itinerary that meets my brief, I’m going to post them on this website with the naming convention “Dreaming of xxx; a speculative travel itinerary”. Perhaps someone else out there can take my research and turn it into a trip of their own one day.