Slow Motion

Bariloche, Argentina (2009)

 When I spend too much time with my head buried in the planning, I sometimes forget the plan.

I’ve been reading travel books and blogs for months now.  I keep combing them for gems of must-see locations, budgeting tips, and packing lists.  I find these blogs both fascinating and troubling.

Most of these people are traveling hard core.  A different hostel every night (often staying in dorm rooms), carrying only two changes of clothing, showering every 2-3 days, and breaking their backs to schlep their stuff on trains, planes, and buses through country after country.

When I finally remember to pull myself away from these resources and take a breath, I am full of panic – how are we going to possibly do this?

The answer?  We aren’t.

John and I established early on that the new-bed-every-night way of travel isn’t what we want.  We want to find an apartment in a cool city, settle for a month, and then move to the next city and do the same thing.  We want to have a kitchen to cook in, a regular shower we don’t have to share with 20 other people, and some semblance of routine.  Otherwise, after about 3 months I think we’d honestly be cooked and ready to come home.

Our essential idea is the 4 to 1 ratio – for every week we spend “playing tourist” we’ll have four weeks of living.  So we’ll spend a week playing in Cuba, followed by a month living in Peru.  A week in Costa Rica, followed by a month in Nicaragua.  You get the idea.  This way we’ll have more time to really enjoy a culture and surroundings, rather than flying through it on the way to our next destination.

So if you had also been trying to picture the two of us scrambling from city to city, finding a new place to stay each night and washing our clothes in the bathroom sink, you can breathe a sigh of relief.  We will be moving in slow motion.

And hopefully showering more than every 3 days.