TMI Thursday: I Plan My Next Vacation While I’m On My Current Vacation

Toucans in the Amazon jungle

What you might not know about me is that I used to be a food, wine and travel writer; that I excelled in Spanish in high school and minored in French and German in college because my dream was to be a diplomat; and that I did my first live abroad foreign exchange when I was fifteen. As an adult, most people I dated were immigrants or children of immigrants who I traveled with back to their/parents home countries. I ended up marrying the child of an immigrant and we spend a LOT of time in South America (but that’s another story).

All of this is an extremely long-winded way of saying that I REALLY love to travel. I lived abroad for the first time when I was fifteen. When too much time passes before I get to go to a far-flung place, I feel cooped up and restless. You will see my picture in the dictionary next to the definition of “wanderlust”.

No glass by the pool in Panama

The worst is when I was preggo and couldn’t travel because I was too morning sick, then too big, then too busy with an infant. I was so desperate to get out of town that I ordered my then-infant a passport before I even knew where we were going. We were on a plane the same week he hit six months old.

Witnessing how nutso I had gotten from staying home that year, Mr. Blades has got out of my whenever I tell him it’s time to plan a vacation, every year since. We now start planning each next vacation while on the current vacation. As in, I’m sipping a mojito on the beach and thinking aloud about our next destination and by the time we get on the plane home, we have a hard agreement about where we’ll go and what we’ll do.

Marina view in St. Lucia

Now, I know what you’re thinking: why can’t I live in the moment and enjoy the vacation I’m on rather than taking myself out of my mojito moment and thinking ahead to another place? Do I need to pull out my Ram Das and Pema Chodoron books and practice being in the moment? Or is there something healthy about riding the wave of possibility and imagination as I muse on where I’d like to go next?

I can’t answer such existential questions. What I do know is that vacation time is our quiet time to be out of our element and think about all of our possibilities. It’s our time to experience and dream and pontificate and reflect upon the things we love to do and what we’d love to do more of. The one we planned on our last vacation was a cruise to Alaska. This one’s been on our list for a while!