The (lost) art of planning trips

When I used to travel extensively, planning a vacation or a family trip was easy, painless and fast. I was in the “groove” and had plenty of practice. 

Since I have retired and quit traveling like crazy and after having lived through the Covid “travel freeze”, I’m no longer the adventure planner I used to be and doing so saps a lot of my energy, stresses me out and becomes more of a chore than pure pleasure.

There’s a project I’m in the midst of right now that has given me a lot of challenge. We where at first contemplating a pretty complicated trip involving Greece and its Islands, combined with a family and friends visit to France, yet I had to backtrack and start over from scratch, throwing all my precious planning work out of the window, because the first plan proved to be too complicated. 

This doesn’t mean that plan B won’t be hard, difficult and complicated either, but there will be less “moving parts” and I might be able to fare better in untangling those. I am also pretty confident that I’ll learn a lot while doing that over. At lest that’s the kind of tangible benefit I always expect from any struggle I’m faced with!