Things are busy these days on the work front: Lots of projects, lots of calls, lots of events. My schedule is always busy, and there’s always more work on the horizon, it seems.
So it’s been incredible this week to travel with Sally to Portugal. This was a trip we booked, on a whim, a few months back. Flights were cheap, and hotels were cheap. We booked those, and left the rest entirely unplanned. A few friends sent over recommendations, but truly, until we landed, we didn’t know that much about what we’d do this week.
When we travel, we always like to do a few things: Eat a lot, try a few new things, do something cultural, and try to get some rest. But otherwise, for a trip like this, the goal isn’t to overplan — our work days are full of structure, so a trip like this is the opportunity to about what I’ll call “unstructure”: The opportunity to leave things open-ended, to figure things out day by day.
Does it mean that we might miss out on something essential? Possibly! (Though the staff at the hotel or the taxi driver at the airport will probably point you towards those things anyway.) We’ve found that if you book your hotel and flights, that provides plenty of structure for your vacation. You know where you’ll be and when you’ll be there. Once you’re there, you can ask questions, be curious, explore, and figure out the rest.
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One of the hotels where we stayed had a hike up to a scenic overlook. It was one of those things that wasn’t in any guidebook or even on the hotel’s website — we noticed it on the drive in and asked if there was a path to go check it out. This photo is the view from the top.