With too many choices

Sometimes people ask me who plans our travel. That person is me, primarily. I enjoy doing it, mostly, and in some ways it feels like a creative act. Imagining the experiences and shaping the destinations creates a certain environment for our family. In all creative endeavors, limitations are necessary. No limitations, it’s much harder to be creative, as I’ve been experiencing lately.

We are heading to the Olympics in France this summer, a decision we made months ago. We have flights to (arriving in Zurich) and from (departing Paris) the Olympics, but we arrive with a lot of time before the Olympics actually start.

We always just planned to figure it out later, but having no plan has actually been hard. No specific destination, no specific goals. I’ve been kind of aimlessly thinking about it for months. I checked out guide books for Switzerland, Austria and Germany from the library hoping for inspiration. Maybe we rent a camper van and drive around - the whole family liked the national parks trip we did in Utah a lot. Try to go somewhere that’s not a big European capitol because we didn’t love London. The kids love a beach trip but not to an all inclusive big resort. My mind was a collection of random threads unwoven into any kind of useful plan.

Sunday night, I invited Ruthie (and Harper) to watch the Grammy’s with me. They were into it, loving Dua Lipa and Miley Cyrus’s performances, asking me who everyone is (which of course I don’t know because I know about as much about pop culture as I know about car mechanics). But parenting a tween makes you learn about weird stuff, so I’m sitting there googling people and trying to explain what’s going on. Ruthie was so excited about the Grammy’s that she couldn’t sleep Sunday night - watching Taylor Swift announce her new album was a thrill unlike any other in Ruthie’s life. I made her go to bed before Taylor Swift’s Album of the Year win, so that made less of an impression on Ruthie.

This morning, I woke up thinking that we should just see if Taylor Swift tickets are at all reasonable this summer, since I think she’s performing in Europe while we are there. And so we search, and find that there’s a show in Zurich on Ruthie’s 10th birthday, on July 10th, so her “Golden Birthday” (which I’m fairly certain was not something anyone cared about when I was a kid). And the tickets are not thousands of dollars. So we decided to make that work in our plan.

And having that one place we have to be helped the rest of the trip start taking some shape, by grabbing some of the threads and weaving them into something that will work for us. Rent a camper van and camp/drive from Zurich to Croatia. Spend some time off the normal European vacation path in Croatia on an island. Explore some countries no one I know has ever been to in Montenegro, Serbia, maybe Albania? Fly back to Zurich for the concert.

Then do the rest of the time exploring Swiss mountain villages and maybe some of Eastern France. That’s enough shape to work with - when you have the whole world (or in this case, continent) on a platter, it’s impossible. With some limitations, it’s joy to create the plan.

So next time you have something to plan around, or somewhere you must be on a trip on a certain day, or some other limitation in your life, welcome that with joy because it can give the anchor and the shape to a trip or an experience that is needed to really create something special.