2018 Eastern Mediterranean Trip - In Review - Lessons

Okay, I promise...I mean it...really...I do...you can count on it...go to the bank with it...

This is the LAST POST on the 2018 Eastern Mediterranean Trip.

So what great lessons have we learned on this trip?

Are we ready to act our age?

Accepting age limitations and restricting our efforts remains much more theory and a discussion point than practice. We talk a good game but the minute we are out in the field our will power falls faster than a souffle out of the oven. I mean really, the first day, the very first freaking day in Jaffa, we walked ourselves into the ground!

But the flip side of this is that I continue to return from these trips feeling (once I’ve recovered) physically stronger and mentally more alert. So what is the right balance? Not sure.

A subtle change in attitude about travel

When we first started doing these long trips, I felt a kind of pressure that we need to this or we might never do it. There was almost an urgency to take advantage of the opportunity. After nine of these long trips, there is no longer the feeling of needing to do them because you are afraid you never will. If it all stopped now, could say we did a helluva a lot. But on the other hand I believe we have also gained the understanding that we will travel and will continue to travel. We have openly talked about if as we become less physically able to travel the way we have been, we will just change the way we travel. It has truly become part of who we are. Which has led to…

A change in my perception of my life

An understanding that the travel life and the home/work life are one. When people now ask me how my vacation was or have I gotten back into the work routine, it really doesn't compute. Because for me all I have is one life, a life that is composed of my work transformed so it supports and nourishes me rather than drains me and my travel. Sometimes I am more traveling and work is less prevalent. And other times I am working more and travel is in planning mode. But they are just two sides of the same.

On using guides

One of the influences of aging has been an increase in our reluctance to do things like driving on our own in many situations. Another has been a reluctance to attack cultures that we are unfamiliar with totally on our own. This has led to our making greater and greater use of guides. Our first use of a packaged guide/driver/accommodation trip was in Albania last fall. We did two this time - Jordan and Turkey. In Greece, the Peloponnese, we used a guide to get us around but arranged our own housing. 

There are pluses and minuses to this system. Guides as a general rule, have their own agenda...by that I mean they have a certain world view and if you are with them you are going to get them. Based on what we'd heard from many people who have been to Israel and used guides, I was pretty glad we did our own thing there and could have our impressions be unsullied. But I would not have been comfortable doing that in the areas where we had our guide drivers because driving and navigating would have been really tough. We got all our big guides this time through the TourHQ site. I was pretty happy overall with what we got and after this experience think I can use that sites resources more effectively to get what we want.

And on to the future

When I discovered the joy of the long trip, I had a passion to do them, as if I didn’t I would be missing the opportunity forever. And it was clear that the whole process of planning the trips and then managing during the trip provided stimulation to an important part of me that used to come from working…a part that needed to still be stimulated at some level especially if I wasn’t working.

Then two things took place that caused me to reevaluate. One the voice of limitations I’ve alluded to before became stronger and stronger. Even before we started this type of travel, we had these ideas of things we were going to do when we traveled that never came to pass because of limitations that arose. It is clear we can’t do what we thought we might have even five years ago because of various limitations that inexorably keep growing.

But equally important, I have mastered how to do all kinds of different traveling to all kinds of different places. Now it feels like the whole process of how one does traveling like this has become less of an effort. Before it took so much thinking to plan out a trip and consider all the options. Now if you told me we could go off for long trip, I think I could put something together in weeks. The need to plan to the extreme is really not required. And frankly, it is not quite the challenge or as stimulating. Yet the need for challenge and stimulation remain.

This has caused rethinking on what we might do and how we might do it. Result? An exciting new list of opportunities to explore. Maybe we shouldn’t lock into a destination, but should follow the availability of airfares to take us wherever that leads? Perhaps we should try to do things purposely with less notice. Maybe we should travel less long and more often? We are going to try this fall to do a completely unscripted, unplanned road trip in the US (the smart money is all on my caving just before the trip starts and make a bunch of reservations). I feel like a flower that is blooming. So many new ways for us to go out into this wonderful world and find experiences.