Memorable vacation and Following the "Plan"

Traveling for the past 2 months with my husband has been the most memorable vacation I’ve ever had. He has been looking forward to this for years and finally we were able to make his dream come true. Meanwhile, I had doubts about being with him 24/7 for 2 months, not because I don’t love him, but because I was afraid too much togetherness would drive me crazy. Instead the opposite was true. Spending this time together, we were able to talk a lot and reconnect in ways we couldn’t when we were both working. We spent a lot of time together when we were working but this was different. You see, we are very opposite in many ways. Don likes to do things spur of the moment and even though we make plans, they could change at the last minute. I am a planner and I like to know ahead of time what I’m doing and where we are going. Planning makes me feel in control and I don’t like to feel as if I am not in control, which really stresses me out. To compromise, Don would try to plan the night before and stick to the plan as much as he could. Every night we would talk about what we would do the following day or where we would head but I would keep “planning” that our plans might change. This helped me tremendously. I learned that spontaneity is not a bad thing and could lead to lots of fun things. So I guess I learned to loosen up more and see what happens. Here are some examples of how our plans changed and the fun that resulted.

1. When we planned to go to Yosemite and camp for a week in a tent, and then the weather turned bad (down to 9 degrees at night), we cancelled our reservation and went to Joshua Tree National Park, Nixon and Reagan Presidential Libraries.
2. When we realized we were pretty close to Anaheim, we decided to spend a couple of days at Disneyland and was able to find a cheap hotel right down the street from the entrance.
3. When it was too early to stop for the night where we planned, we drove straight into San Francisco and was able to spend another night there instead of killing time someplace there was nothing to do.
4. When we found out the roads we wanted to take to Las Vegas was closed because of snow, we took a different route and was able to spend a couple of days in Yosemite National Park like we had hoped to do, only weeks early.
5. When we got to the top of California and was going to head east like we planned, we decided we were kind of close to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon so we went there. It was neat to see the 10 feet of snow on each side of the road as we drove into the park.

Photo credit: First Floor Plan by smalloy