Do you return home from a vacation resolved to learn from your travels and to navigate your next adventure with a little more wisdom than your last? I do. But resolutions take practice and require consistent attention. Who hasn’t experienced the fierce surge of a New Year’s resolution, only to feel it fade away to a faint tickle of desire until eventually, it is forgotten?
A few weeks ago, travel expert Wendy Perrin asked professional wanderers, like myself, to share their travel resolutions for 2015. If one of your New Year’s Resolutions is to use your vacation days to travel—and to make every trip truly count—you’ll find inspiration in the collection of ideas that she published here.
My resolutions incorporate habits I wish to both cultivate and eliminate. For example, no matter how convinced I am that I want to be someone who listens well, I still babble away when I am nervous or excited. I also have a terrible, habitual urge to control—myself, my husband, my circumstances. A quality that is always counterproductive. And, for better or worse, my natural impulse is to want to settle in, to stay and make a home in almost every place I visit. I've spent nearly two decades trying to reconcile this desire with a career in travel. It's the inspiration behind my first book and the motivation for the nomadic lifestyle my husband and I have chosen. By temporarily inhabiting different places for three, six or sixteen months—or however long visas and finances allow—the homebody and exploratory parts of me are equally satisfied. It's a balancing act that I'm resolved to keep refining.
What about you? How will you travel smarter in 2015? Use the comment box below, or at WendyPerrin.com, to share your travel resolutions. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Ellen Barone is an American writer and wanderer. She co-founded and publishes the group travel blog YourLifeIsATrip.com and is currently at work on her first book "I Could Live Here".