Travel Need Not Be That Hard or Expensive
When people are asked about their New Year’s resolutions or what they’d put highest on their “Bucket List,” they often list TRAVEL. But what keeps us from it? Money? Time? Convenience? A travel buddy?
Years ago, I wanted to travel but we could never really afford it, or thought we couldn’t. Later, we had small children, and that seemed to be a good excuse not to travel much. I mean, just think of loading strollers and playpens and hauling small kids through customs! But you know what? We didn’t do any of those things when we didn’t have kids, or at least not very often. We didn’t just take off to the mountains to go camping for a long weekend or even to a terrific historical site or tourist site two hours away for a long Saturday or enjoy a bed and breakfast in mid-winter one town over. There were always reasons not to or reasons to put such trips off. Many trips could have been rather cheap and over a weekend, yet we rarely ventured out.
The first time I visited England, I was impressed by how much younger I was than my campanions on a bus to Stonehenge. Many of them could barely hobble to an archeological site, let alone climb it, but they’d waited until retirement to see the world. I knew then that I wanted to travel more for enjoyment and while I was young enough to climb and walk and endure the journey without extreme physical stress.
Since my divorce, I’ve taken my girls on several trips, including Disney for a long weekend, writers’ conferences in Daytona on the ocean for a week, a couple of pagan festivals where I slept in bunks at a campsite, a long weekend for my mom in the gardens she’d always wanted to visit. But this past year, I found myself really wanting to explore more and realized in late spring that travel really was more possible than I’d thought. Technology and liberating some of my workload helped to open up this door so that I’m not chained to my desk and can actually be at a different location with family or friends.
I decided that I wanted to visit Central America, specifically the Belize/Costa Rica/Yucatan area and the Mayan temples there. It had always seemed unrealistically expensive in the past. Read the rest of this entry »
If ever anything could break me of the habit of getting wrapped up in useless obsessive minutia, this is it.
You know what I mean by useless and obsessive, right? Like wanting to fire off an angry letter at the idiot retailer and then spending the next two hours telling him how better to conduct business instead of concentating on my own business.
Or politely listening to someone blather on endlessly in a meeting about his special interest when it should be taken care of in a side meeting with one other person–who isn’t me.
Or how about simply spending time worrying about something I can’t control?
Here’s the tool I’m using to break me of that nasty habit: The Meeting Miser at Payscale Tools — http://www.payscale.com/meeting-miser?tk=mm_hmpg02
The idea is that you input the names and salaries of the people attending your meeting and keep the calculator running next to the briefing charts everyone’s staring at for the duration of the meeting. (Where was this when I needed it last week for the 7.5 hour meeting I was stuck in?!) You get an idea of how many dollars are being wasted when the meeting gets off course–or maybe the meeting isn’t needed at all.
My personal use for it, though, is to keep it on my computer screen and whenever I start to obsess about something out of my control or I get that phone call from someone who’s bored and wants me to spend precious time entertaining them, I can start the clock and see how much of my time is worth that I’m wasting. For me, quantifying my worth makes decisions on where to spend my time so much easier.
I guarantee you’ll dig yourself out of the worst of behaviors much more quickly when you assign a value to your time.
“Someday” Is Now
November 4th is “someday.”
I got the idea from a couple of fellow bloggers who asked if I ever thought about doing some trivial task “someday.” I have a long mental list, but not a written one, though I’m likely to start keeping one for whenever the next “someday” comes.
You know the list, right?
Someday, when I have time, I’m going to install the pull-out,
under-cabinet wire baskets I bought for the kitchen trashcan and the cookware.
Someday, when I have time, I’m going to repair the bathroom wallpaper that’s not glued down flat anymore and I’m going to put up the wallpaper border in the girls’ bathroom.
Someday, when I have time, I’m going to trim those shrubs in the wooded area of the back yard, and I’m going to remove some of the low-hanging limbs on the little oak near my office.
Someday, when I have time, I’m going to move the last of the excess inventory in the office to the supply closet and then go through those three big boxes of papers I’ve kept locked away for years.
Someday….
Most of my “someday” jobs are the really, really trivial ones around the house that don’t matter but pile up and tug at my attention, and I’d love to get them out of the way once and for all. They just sooooo far down the priority list that they’ll never get done at this rate.
So I’ve declared November 4th as “Someday,” the day I will work on all those silly, tiny, annoying little tasks I’ve put off until someday when I have time. And while I’m doing my someday list? I’ll listen to an audiobook or class that I’ve been putting off for someday, too.