Those that know me personally will tell you I’m a planner.  I like to have things planned out well in advance, and that includes travel.  Over the years, we’ve been able to travel as much as we have due to that planning.  We’ve been able to plan ahead and get great deals, use holidays to our advantage and able to explore much more of the world due to that planning.  But this year, I’m learning to embrace more spontaneous travel and I’m actually fulling embracing and enjoying it.  At the moment, I only have travel planned through March and while that used to terrify me, I’m actually loving it.  I’m learning to embrace spontaneous travel this year.

You see, this year, Nick and I have some professional changes that we knew were coming and we purposely didn’t want to have a booked calendar so that we had some maneuverability for our professional stuff.  So we booked through March and then the rest of the year, we’ll be booking closer to when we travel.  I definitely have some ideas of places we’d like to go this year but overall, I’m trying to stay spontaneous and take advantage of “in the moment” travel.

Sometimes, the freedom of being able to book last minute, brings a feeling of excitement like nothing else.  Some of my favorite travel memories revolve around spontaneous travel like when I booked a flight home from Hawaii to see Nick over the weekend 3 hours before the flight, or when we booked an escape to Amsterdam just a few weeks before leaving.  Those moments have alway been some of my favorites and this year, I’m trying to embrace this idea more than ever.

So the moral of the story is: planning is great, but sometimes you get to a point when you have to throw it all to the wind and trust that it will work out.  Life has a funny way of leading you in the direction you really need to go and change is good.  So follow where the wind takes you and if you’re a Type A planner like me, sometimes the spontaneity of travel can add an edge to your life you never knew you were missing!