Adventure is a State of Mind
Have you ever gone on a trip that you wish you hadn’t?
Most of the time, we return from our travels filled with good memories and excited to share stories and photos with our friends and family.
But sometimes we’re left with regrets and wishes that we’d done something different.
What Went Wrong?
As we all know, there is no perfect trip. Even as part of the most amazing trip ever, there are still likely to be at least some parts that you wish you had done differently.
Some of the most common “mistakes” include not enjoying your travel partner, not enjoying the things you did and visited, and of course, things not going exactly as planned. Let’s consider each of these in more detail.
Not Enjoying Your Travel Partner
Let’s face it, there are some people that make good travel partners for you and some who don’t. As much as someone might be a good friend on a daily basis, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re well-matched as travel partners. If you find yourself thinking, “I love them, but I’d kill them if I had to live with them,” they’re probably not someone you want to share a vacation rental with.
If you’re not sure whether you could comfortably travel with someone, definitely talk with them about how they like to travel. Or try traveling together on a short-term basis, such as a weekend road trip, before scheduling an epic, multi-week-long travel adventure with them.
If you’ve already taken the trip, however, and it didn’t go so well with your travel companions, take some time to consider why that was. Did they not enjoy the same activities as you? Maybe you can still travel together but need to put more effort into researching and planning things that you both will enjoy.
Did the times you each wanted to sleep or eat not match up? Would creating more space in your travel days during a future trip allow you the flexibility to each operate on the clock you most prefer? What lessons did you learn from this trip that could be applied to the schedule of future adventures to make them work better for everyone?
Did your travel companion have one particularly annoying habit that you’d never noticed before but began to grate on your nerves by the fourth day? Did you have an annoying habit that began to grate on their nerves by the second day? If so, maybe you’re not ideal travel partners.
Just because someone is a good friend doesn’t mean you have to travel together. Even if someone is your partner in life, you don’t have to travel together. You can travel alone or ask friends who do make good travel companions to join you. Alternatively, tours can be a great option when you don’t feel comfortable traveling on your own.
If you do feel like you have no option but to travel with a certain person who is not well-matched to your traveling style, as is often the case with family members, it is still valuable to examine why traveling together didn’t go as well as you had hoped. For example, are they not a good traveler, in general? If so, what adjustments could be made to make the next adventure more comfortable for them?
Not Enjoying the Trip Itself
Not enjoying the places you visited may feel like the biggest waste of money and time. After all, why did you take the trip if you didn’t enjoy it?
The good news is that it is incredibly rare that someone doesn’t enjoy their entire trip. After all, if nothing about the area or activities appealed to you, it’s highly unlikely you would have chosen to go there.
Having said that, Greg and I did once encounter someone who clearly did not do his research before setting off on his vacation. We were in Delphi, Greece, and happened to overhear a stereotypically-dressed American tourist (think Hawaiian shirt and black socks with sandals) at the back of a tour group complaining to his wife that he regretted coming on the tour because it had been “nothing but rocks and old stuff!”
Honestly, I’m not sure he knew a single thing about Greece before leaving home. He clearly didn’t do much research because if he had, he would have expected a large portion of the trip to be dedicated to “rocks and old stuff.”
There is always the possibility you won’t enjoy parts of your trip. Sometimes what we see on Instagram isn’t quite the same as reality. If that’s the case, try to identify what it was that you specifically didn’t enjoy. It might have been the experience itself – for example, if you realized you actually hate the feeling of sand between your toes, you might not want to travel to many beaches in the future.
On the other hand, sometimes what you didn’t like has more to do with when you visited. If you didn’t like the crowds you experienced, consider planning your next adventure during an off season or to an area less popular with tourists. If the weather was too hot for you, consider scheduling during the low or shoulder season.
When It Doesn’t Match the Plan
There’s a good chance you’ve heard the Yiddish proverb, “Man plans, God laughs.” It’s true. In both daily life and travel adventures, we can plan all we want, but almost always something goes off script.
It makes most of us anxious to say, “things didn’t go as planned,” but it’s not always a bad thing. Uncomfortable, maybe. But not bad. Often a lot of unexpected delight and laughter occurs when things go “wrong.”
Regardless, when we travel, it can be particularly disappointing if we plan something momentous that doesn’t end up happening. For example, if you plan a special event for your first day in a new country but your flight is delayed and you arrive a day late, you’re understandably going to feel let down.
If this happens, besides acknowledging the disappointment, try to identify what happened to interrupt or mess up your plans. Obviously, you can’t go back in time and change what happened, but you might be able to learn a lesson or two from the experience. Consider the example above. You might decide in the future that when flying, you will build a buffer day into the schedule with nothing important scheduled. That way if your flight is delayed, you won’t have missed anything important. And if you arrive as scheduled, you’ll have an extra day to explore at a leisurely pace as you’re recovering from jet lag.
The Postmortem
As you may have figured out from the examples above, one of the most important things to do when an adventure (or life) doesn’t go as planned is to take a good hard look at what happened and why. Our reward for life’s disappointments and frustrations is the jewel of knowledge that is often hidden within the experience.
When someone dies unexpectedly, the medical examiner often conducts a postmortem to determine the cause of death. If you watch crime shows, you know that postmortems also often provide other information about who the person was, what they did while alive, as well as how they died.
We can engage in a similar process with our travel adventures. After your trip, by yourself or with your travel companions, consider taking some time to examine your experiences. Identify the things that didn’t go well, but don’t just stop there. Examine more closely why you didn’t enjoy them. Figure out lessons you can apply and do differently the next time.
And don’t forget to also look at what you did enjoy. Even the worst experiences probably have silver linings. Maybe you didn’t particularly like the city you visited, but you loved the hotel you stayed in. Is that hotel part of a chain that is also located in other cities you plan to visit? Maybe you and your travel companion rubbed each other wrong after spending too many days together, but you discovered they love trying unique gin cocktails, something you can continue to enjoy with them even after you return home.
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
John Steinbeck
Course Correct When Possible
We’ve been discussing what to do when you return home after a trip you didn’t particularly enjoy, but you can also evaluate, learn, and course correct while you are in the middle of your adventure. For example, if you’ve realized one week into your two-week trip in France that you don’t really enjoy French food, you don’t have to continue eating it. This is what my dad did when he and my mom traveled to France with us. He ate a lot of hamburgers after that realization. In my opinion, he missed out on one of the joys of visiting France, but he was happier.
Depending on how much flexibility you have built into your plans, you may be able to make even larger course corrections. In 1982, when I was in high school, my family set out on a road trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, for the World’s Fair. As we got closer, the hotels and roads got busier, and my dad had several conversations with travelers returning from Knoxville about how crowded it was there. He and my mom decided they no longer wanted to go to the fair and gave my brother and I the option of choosing where we would go instead. That’s how I ended up visiting New Orleans for the first time, a trip we all thoroughly enjoyed!
Don’t Let Anyone or Anything Steal Your Joy in the Moment
Sometimes you may have an experience that you cannot easily course correct. For example, if something significant happens, such as losing your passport or having your credit cards stolen, it’s too late to prevent the problem. Instead, you have to do damage control, such as contacting the closest embassy to replace your passport or calling your credit card company to cancel your cards.
After you’ve done what you can, however, the next most important action is to make sure what you’re thinking doesn’t ruin the rest of your trip. Don’t focus so much on what went wrong that you can’t enjoy the moments you are living right now.
As many of you already know from first hand experience, negative experiences are so “sticky” to our brains that they’re often very difficult to let go. Don’t be the traveler who is looking at a beautiful work of art in the Louvre Museum and thinking, “That’s nice… but that stupid pickpocket took my credit cards!”
If you find your mind drifting back to negative experiences, try to refocus on the current moment you’re experiencing. What can you see, hear, and smell? True enjoyment is found in the moment we’re currently living in.
And when you do catch yourself in the past instead of the present (which you will from time to time), besides the lessons you learned, try to find humor or at least a good story in the experience. Often our greatest adventures and funniest stories are found in the things that went “wrong” rather than in our original itinerary.
Consider What You Can and Cannot Control
When conducting your postmortem, it’s important to keep in mind what you can and cannot control. When you identify a reason you didn’t enjoy something on your trip, ask whether you could have actually done anything different. If not, let it go.
On the other hand, if you actually do have some power to make changes to similar situations in the future, take note of what you wished you had done differently and make a different choice next time.
For example, if you’re disappointed you didn’t have more time to explore the museum you visited, examine why that was. Did the museum close early because a pipe broke and the bathrooms flooded? Not under your control.
On the other hand, did the museum close early because of a local holiday? When places decide to close is not under your control, but there might have been pieces of this experience that you could do differently the next time, such as making sure to pay attention to the local holidays and whether a museum you plan to visit closes for those holidays. (It’s often listed on their websites under their hours of admission.)
Pay Attention to Patterns
If you develop a habit of evaluating your “failures,” you’ll likely start to notice patterns. Are you always exhausted and have regrets when you try to do too much? Does how much you enjoy your travel adventures depend heavily on the comfort of the beds and how well you sleep each night? Do large crowds prevent you from thoroughly enjoying experiences?
Notice these patterns and then take action to prevent them. Often travelers dismiss their reactions or try to talk themselves out of them, such as telling themselves that where they choose to stay shouldn’t impact how they feel about the adventure overall. But for some people, it really does make a difference.
Don’t worry whether what’s important to you differs from others. Taking your preferences into account can be the difference between a successful travel adventure and one you label a “failure.”
Change Your Thinking
Once you’ve done a postmortem and learned everything you can from your experience to help you with future planning, it’s time to change how you think about the experience.
When trips and life don’t go as planned, we often assume that things would have gone better if we’d made different choices and done things differently. After all, that’s why we just did the postmortem, isn’t it?
Well, maybe yes, maybe no.
It’s important to examine our experiences and actions so that we can learn from our mistakes and do our best to create the experiences we desire in the future. But when life doesn’t go as planned, we can’t always know that things would have turned out better if they had been different in the past. Maybe the small disaster we experienced prevented us from experiencing an even bigger disaster!
There are often positives to be gained even from negative experiences. For example, maybe you’ve learned that renting a car and driving in another country is so stressful that it’s hard to enjoy the rest of the trip. Use that knowledge and plan to exclusively travel by train and public transportation during your future travel adventures. Once you’ve done that, focus on the positive memories of visiting a small village that can’t be reached by train. Or feel good about the confidence you gained from knowing you can drive a car in another country and return it to the rental agency in one piece.
As Dr. Ellen Langer says, “Instead of trying to make the right decision, make the decision you made right.”
Live Life as an Experiment
When we approach life as an experiment, we give ourselves room to fail and to learn from those failures. If you’re willing to be adventurous and try new things, they aren’t always going to go as planned. But if you approach your travel adventures as experiments, the possibility of things not going as planned doesn’t seem so scary. And when things don’t go as planned, it doesn’t mean we “failed.” It means we experimented and learned something new about ourselves from the outcome.
So whether it’s your most recent vacation or a major life decision, the experience not turning out the way you hoped doesn’t mean it or you were a failure. Don’t let things going sideways ruin the entire experience for you. Learn from your experiences. Find enjoyment in as many of them as you can.
And remember that with experiments, you get to adjust the variables and do them differently the next time!!
Have you ever had a travel adventure that was a “failure?” What did you learn from it? What was the best part of the experience?
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