After lockdown, post lock down, another variant is a coming and a million other things I’m fairly sure that we are ALL Ready to get away. How an what this looks like will be different for everyone. Knowing the vacation styles of those you travel with and what they need is important for your stress level.
After lockdown, post lock down, another variant is a coming and a million other things I’m fairly sure that we are ALL Ready to get away. How an what this looks like will be different for everyone. Knowing the vacation styles of those you travel with and what they need is important for your stress level.
In life we have two choices, to experience or to exist. Every week, each of us makes that choice to either seek a better way to live or to get by. walk alongside me each week on the strive seek find podcast as we continue to seek our own brilliant future. As Chevy Chase showed in his trip to Walley world, an over planned trip can drive you nuts. So rather than kidnapping a security guard, sometimes you just need to step back. Welcome to the strive seek find podcast, I'm your host chance Whitmore after lockdown, post lockdown, another very it's coming, and a million other things going on. I'm fairly sure we are all ready to get away. How, and what this looks like will be different from everyone. But who you're traveling with, better have an impact on how you travel. As I have learned, much to my painful chagrin, in the past 20 years. Now let's get started. I should have known better. So it's back to the Wayback Machine. Because it's time to review a lesson I should have learned early in my marriage. So in this edition, we're gonna take a quick look at vacation styles. For this to make sense, I need to go way way back to what was truly my second vacation in my life. For my points here, I'm going to define terms again. For it to be a vacation, you cannot be traveling mainly to see and stay with family. Though in this trip, we did a little of both. I'm also going to point out that this was what I'm going to call a fallback trip. Because we had a trip we were trying to plan to Scotland, and it didn't work out. airfare was taken care of. But our housing fell apart last second. It turned out for my wife and I Scotland was still I believe, a decade away, maybe a little more. So we end up in Colonial Williamsburg in part because we can get housing. airfares taken care of, we're ready to go. And there's some other things here. At this point in my life, I was teaching English and a little bit of history. Williamsburg my thoughts were all obviously, hey, think of all the historical trips we can take during the time where there another reason my grandparents at the time were in their late 90s they couldn't come to the wedding. So we figured a day road trip down to the Carolinas was an order. And I thought on top of all this, maybe I could sneak into DC because I'd never been next up. There were Amy's thoughts on the whole honeymoon ideal. And as far as I've reconstructed the year since they went something like oh god, oh god, I'm so tired after planning and having a wedding. Can't I just sleep and sit by the pool. So we get there and I'm excited. So it's off to the races. We're gonna tour the city. We start hitting battlefields, Jamestown and the Jamestown archaeology site all their dad run. It was my version of playing Pokemon. Got to see it all. After all the odds said I would never be back. And I'm going to credit Amy, as tired as she was. She tried to hang. And then we were headed down the road to the archeology site After touring the Jamestown reconstruction. And she was done. She was fried. She was almost sick, she was so tired. So we had to change direction. The rest of the vacation was me trying to make sure that my new wife a didn't collapse from exhaustion, or NB didn't beat me to death as I slept. The lesson comes down to know your partner or your vacation partners approach to vacation and try to balance it with yours. And since it's been 17 years, you would have thought I'd gotten smarter. And I'm going to give myself nothing but a slight maybe on this one and followed up with a problem. Probably not. So back in April, during the midst of all of the unknowns, we decided to take a swing for the fences because we didn't know which direction the COVID scale was going. And we found a pay at place on the Oregon beach for five days. And I started planning. Oregon beers are some of my favorite in the world. Specifically Pelican right there on the beach. So I started planning visits to Pelican visits to rogue visits to frame hikes to do which towns to visit beyond the one we're staying in. For instance, tell them up just for the ice cream, Newport for the aquarium. I have that itinerary about half scoped out. I was dialed in. And then I stepped back. And I listened. I listened to the girls, all three of them, who were only asking for time to play on the beach to my wife, who was speaking out about her own exhaustion and high side a little bit. And I made a change. We cut everything. Well, almost everything. And it became a loose framework instead of a plan. That loose framework went something like Well, here's things we can do. The only thing we have to do is sit on the beach. So that's what we did. Day one, the kids were up and out on the beach by 9am 10 to 12 hours later, they were back inside. And let's be honest, my kids are colored a little bit like me and that they would look like they burst into flame. If a sunbeam looks in their direction, after that amount of time on the beach, there was a little bit of burning going on, which then opened the door. We didn't want them on the beach the next day. So we ran to get them ice cream and tell them UK and me beer at Pelican brewing but that was just a nice side note and discovered that a line of 500 people isn't worth waiting in for ice cream. So off we went. spent the rest of the day in an indoor saltwater pool and the kids were perfectly happy. Then another 10 hour day on the beach with much more sunscreen. It almost drove me insane. I felt the need to be doing something. I read two books. I played with the kids. I jumped in the waves too. But the impact on the wife and kids was immense. They built sandcastles. They buried themselves in the sand. They jumped in the waves, they collected seashells, they were at peace. So all the things I wanted to do for them and with them would have been at best window dressing and at worst an impediment for what they really needed. Which was to experience the ocean and relax. Five days later, happier, more more relaxed family because I listened. All this to say is know your own travel style. And understand the style of those who travel with understand their needs, plan, research, know what's there. But be flexible. Sometimes the greatest experiences you have are completely unplanned. Case in point when the ice cream didn't work out. We stayed until the muck and there was a French cheese place that was still serving Telemark ice cream, and the kids really enjoyed it even though it went from probably 200 choices of flavor down to eight. They had a great time. And to quote The great sage, a Ron Rogers, R e l a x relax and have a little fun because turning a vaycay into a stressful day is a waste of what it's supposed to be. This week is the first I'm including a promo for another podcast on the program. This week's promo comes from the second season of one of my favorites, the not before coffee podcast hosted by Ray Hi, I'm Ray, avid reader TV show marathoner long term depression sufferer and caffeine addict. In this podcast I open up about my lifetime of experience with various mental health diagnoses and how I cope with them on a daily basis as well as my love of all things books. And the TV shows I just cannot stop watching. So where does the coffee come in? You may well ask. I can't function before I've had at least my third cup of the dark roasted bean. Welcome to the interesting world that is my brain with every single episode of not before coffee. found where all podcasts ray is a longtime supporter of strive seek find at her show is top notch. Tune in for streaming shows you may have missed on Mondays, and Thursdays for latest treats. Check it out. Shout outs. quick shout out to Zach Josh and Charlie for providing us with multiple episodes of material on our jaunt into Oregon. Until next time, gentlemen, we can't wait that long again. worth mentioning. With work slowing down, there's been more time to read to the point where last week I've completed my whole summer reading goal. You may hear more about this in a future episode. The first of these books was a history text called nuke the moon and other intelligent schemes and military plots left on the drawing board by Vince Houghton. Helton just happens to be the historian for the spy Museum, a place I've always wanted to visit. In this case, he's writing short summaries of these schemes, what led to them and why they were never put into play. Everything from iceberg aircraft carriers to bats firebombing Japan are discussed. While not every plot hits for the reader, they're a fascinating look into the innovation, that desperation can bring and that alone makes it worth mentioning. And that concludes this edition of strive seek find. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, or would just like to support the podcast. Here are a few ways you can do it. You can leave a review on Apple podcasts or pod chaser. They will help bring more listeners to the podcast. If that isn't your style, you can buy me a coffee or purchase submerge. Links are in the podcast description. Finally, if you have ideas or feedback, please reach out to the strive seek find page on Facebook or to @chancewhitmor 5 on Twitter. Until next time, k ep seeking your own brillia t future. Have a great day.