The fun kind of resolution – travel bucket list
Travel resolutions are the kind of resolutions that are fun to follow through on…
The fun kind of resolution – travel bucket list
The new year is always the beginning of a fresh look at the many aspects of our life. Many folks end up with improvement resolutions like losing weight, organizing the house, or start exercising.
On the other hand, travel resolutions are nothing but fun! It’s great to spend time thinking through your desires and to focus on the parts of the world that you want to see, and then make that happen.
Whether you call it your bucket list or your travel goals or whatever, it’s worth taking time to make that list and write it down. Written goals have a higher level of being achieved, and it creates another level of excitement and anticipation in planning your travels.
Travel Bucket List
Sometimes your list can include specific places that you want to see, like the Eiffel tower in Paris, going to the pyramids in Egypt, or visiting the Galapagos.
Other goals can be related to a broader view of your travels. For example, one of my goals is to run out of pages in my passport before it expires. That will mean that I have traveled quite a bit, and also makes me get very excited on every single trip when the passport officer makes that stamp in my passport book, helping to fill those pages. Another goal is to visit all seven continents, and I’ll be making huge progress on that as I head out on my Antarctica trip in three weeks.
A few ideas to help you expand your travel goal list:
- See all the Wonders of the world
- Visit all countries in Europe
- Do a World cruise
- Cruise the longest rivers of the world – Nile, Amazon, Mississippi
- Take a random flight
- Go on an African Safari
- Take a solo trip
- Go Glamping
- Sail on a yacht in Mediterranean
- Take a luxury train journey
As you look at your travel planning for this year, cruising is a way to accomplish visiting a number of bucket list sites all at one time.
Cruising to check off the bucket list
A few years ago, I took an ocean cruise with a rather unusual itinerary – not one that you see very often but had so many fascinating places on it filled with bucket list opportunities.
Using a cruise as your method of transportation is a brilliant way to see a lot of sites that you have on your list that are in different countries and cities. The really nice thing about a cruise is that it’s a very relaxed pace yet you get to see many destinations. You unpack once and you wake up in a different city almost every day.
I work with my clients to find an itinerary that has some overnight stays, so you have two days of touring and the opportunity to experience the destination at night. For the cruise that I did, we had an overnight in Bordeaux, so two days there (wine tours!!) and we had an overnight in London, so two days there plus an evening so we could go to the Globe Theatre to see an evening performance of a Shakespeare play.
That cruise satisfied so many items on my bucket list: Lisbon, Fatima, Northern Spain, Bordeaux (tours of multiple wine regions), a private guide for a Normandy D-Day tour (second time for me but a return visit was on my list), London, Globe Theatre, Bruges Belgium.
Often I’ll pick out a cruise for certain key cities or sites, but I find that I add new items to my bucket list because my research causes me to learn more about the smaller ports and towns that I wasn’t familiar with, and I find amazing things I want to do. I discovered that Northern Spain has a whole different foodie culture going on in these little towns, and that we had the opportunity to explore the Basque cuisine in Bilbao; in Gijon there is the Gijon Gourmet program featuring many Michelin star restaurants. In Torquay England, we walked the Agatha Christie mile to discover the local places that influenced sites in her books, including some hotels and restaurants with fabulous-looking scones and cream tea (you can tell I’m all about the food). I’ve found the experience of exploring some of these smaller towns in Europe can be source of some favorite memories.
There are some cruise itineraries that are very obviously filled with bucket list opportunities. I think a Mediterranean cruise is a perfect example of how you can see so many things on your list with one cruise. You can start in Barcelona, with a visit to La Sagrada Familia and Park Guell, and then stroll Las Ramblas, the pedestrian-friendly walkway. Cruise on to the French Riviera – maybe walk the boardwalk in Cannes and pretend the paparazzi is chasing you or go place a bet in a casino in Monaco.
A cruise stop near Florence gives you the chance to visit the shops of the Ponte Vecchio bridge, tour the Uffizi gallery, climb to the top of the Duomo, and see Michelangelo’s statue of David. Rome is always amazing, and you can see the top picks such as the Vatican Museum, Mass in St Peters, Colosseum, and throw a coin in Trevi Fountain. If you’ve been before, head a little farther out with a visit to Tivoli and Villa d ’Este. Finish in Venice with a gondola ride, a visit to St Mark’s Cathedral and a nightcap listening to the dueling orchestras in St Mark’s square.
It can be fun to look at the diverse items on your bucket list and see how you might combine them into a vacation to see many of those amazing sites while enjoying it all at a relaxing pace. I’m glad to help with that.