Have you heard of the concept of a travel rule, or is it something I’ve just made up? My trip planning has had to get a bit more rigid lately. My son is now old enough that he’s required to stay in school full-time. Combine this with my obsession with Ramit Sethi’s Money for Couples podcast (he suggests you set ‘money rules’ for yourself), and I decided to try out a new rule (experiment?): if someone invites me on a trip – just go!
I was thinking about this after getting an invite to Cornwall in August, somewhere I do really want to visit. But travel will be more expensive after my second turns two, my son’s school schedule doesn’t mesh, it’s so out of the way etc. etc. blah blah.. I’ve had to say probably no.
But that invite still niggles at me. It reminds me of a trip I almost didn’t go on in 2015 to Kazakhstan for a wedding — I’d only just started dating my husband, didn’t really want to go alone, wondered if it was too much to invite him somewhere so far so soon… but I took the leap when someone said Why not? And we loved it. And certainly that opportunity never would have presented itself again.
Can I think of trips that weren’t all that great? Sure. But did I regret them? I don’t think so.
So I’m trying out this rule. If it’s reasonably possible, I want to do it.
Anyway, the first chance I had to make use of this rule was to travel with a friend and her two kids next week to a perfectly random part of Germany. She asked me suddenly and I said, yes! It’s easy(-ish) to get to, cheap and somewhere I’ve never been to.
Did I hesitate? Well, yes. I was going through a bout of family sickness that was not fun. Planning trips seemed pretty far from my radar. And also, Germany? Germany never really seems that exciting. Maybe it’s just too similar to The Netherlands. But… it’s travel. And I wasn’t sure if my answer was ‘no’, so, well, I decided to make my answer ‘yes’. And quickly booked the train tickets and hotel. We won’t spend the whole trip together — her first stop was expensive and didn’t seem that interesting for me. So I stuck to just Hannover. She’ll meet us there. I can tweak these invites as needed. The key is to participate! If travel is my passion, let’s show it. And the bonus is that I get to grow bonds with people I care about.
And a week after planning this trip, I’m actually fairly excited about it now. It’s something new. There’s a daytrip that I can do within that to a quaint castle town. There will be hotel breakfasts with my kids. I’ll give my husband a few days break. And then we get to travel with friends at the end of it. All wins here.
So I’m hyping myself up for Hannover. I started reading a quick travelogue, written by the Frenchman Michel Ange Bernard Mangourit, entitled Travels in Hanover, during the years 1803 and 1804. Just some light reading to get the fundamentals of Hannover down before we go.
