Finding Our Travel Sweet Spot
Larmor-Baden, France (May 2026)
What’s our travel sweet spot? From a time perspective, it’s five weeks. Max. Or at least that’s what we said when we were in Paris in May, getting ready to fly to Montreal. We had eight or nine more days of our trip left, including our youngest child’s college graduation in Vermont. We were tired and we were ready to go home but had to dig deep for the last leg of our seven-week adventure that we knew was also going to be emotional.
Spoiler: it was fine. We were fine. Emotionally it was a lot. But we found a great floating spa called Bota Bota in Montreal that we went to not once, but twice, to ease our physical and emotional ailments.
Why Do We Travel?
We travel because we are curious, we learn better through experience, and it’s really easy to become complacent living where we do.
We travel because it’s one of our few shared interests that we can do mostly together. We are fascinated by how we can be in the same place and have two totally different experiences. It keeps our relationship interesting and gives us something to talk about.
We don’t travel to collect countries (although we do keep track of them) but we do like the novelty of visiting new places. We like seeing and experiencing how people live in other parts of the world. We think it makes us more empathetic and less ignorant humans. It keeps us humble.
Getting Uncomfortable: Travel Stretches Us
Zeke and I were talking about this piece as I prepared to write it and he said you have to ask yourself: how do you want to be uncomfortable when you travel?
Our travel is often uncomfortable but not painfully so (we’ll ignore Zeke’s cycling trips for the moment). I’m an anxious traveler and tend to worry about logistics. Zeke is a lot more chill. I think he can be because I tend to do most of the planning and think through a lot of the details.
When we travel to other countries, we have to figure out local customs and how to navigate using public transportation. Sometimes we have to learn a new language, or at least a few words to be respectful as guests. We try new foods with flavor profiles and textures that are almost always fine with Zeke (the human garbage disposal) but may challenge me.
Sleeping has become an issue which makes everything else a little harder. This was especially difficult during our last trip. Rooms were hot with little air movement. We couldn’t open windows because of the loud street noise. We were in different beds every one to five nights. This wrecks Zeke’s already bad back (being a police officer is not good for a person’s body).
Being tired makes travel even more challenging so we came up with a plan for our fall trip: sleep masks, earplugs, white noise sounds, and we are even bringing our own pillowcases and a small fan to help with air movement.
Pacing
Our spring trip was incredible and we covered a lot of ground. We tried balancing fast travel (Rome, Vienna, Budapest) with some slow travel (Marseille and Madrid). We also mixed in what we thought would be more uncomfortable travel (Tunisia and Morocco) with more familiar travel (France). Every trip is an experiment and one day we hope to find the perfect blend of time, places, activities, and the things that require different levels of energy.
We can honestly say we haven’t yet figured it out.
After our two nights in Rome in April, we established a new rule: a minimum of three nights in one place.
In September, we violate this rule immediately. We are flying into Amsterdam, staying one night and then we both head out on our own separate adventures. Granted, after a night in Paris, I’ll be in one place for two weeks. Zeke will most likely change places nightly as he cycles around the Netherlands. He’s used to that type of travel and cycling daily is not as strenuous as me dragging him through yet another art museum.
But then, as we travel through the Balkans, Romania, and Bulgaria, it’s just not possible to establish a single place to use as home base to explore in a hub-and-spoke fashion. Zeke will grumble about it but I am hoping that it will be worth it.
While in Brittany this past spring, we set up camp in Vannes, Dinan, and Paris for three nights each and we were still challenged.
Hitting the Wall: Sleep and Anticipation
Speaking of Brittany, I think we hit our first real wall in Vannes. We were both tired and cranky and somewhat ratty with each other as we talked about in our most recent video, Exploring Brittany, France | Vannes, Gulf of Morbihan & Beautiful Villages. We were both struggling with sleep.
I was also anxious with FOMO as I hadn’t fully researched Brittany and didn’t have a concrete plan in place. What if we missed all the good spots? As I discussed in the last Beyond the Itinerary, The Problem with “We’ll Come Back” there are so many new places to visit that if we miss something the first time, it’s not likely we’ll go back to see it any time soon. The FOMO is strong in this one.
I was also anxious because we were going to Mont-Saint-Michel, a place that had been on my bucket list for decades, since I first learned about it in college. What if it wasn’t all that and a bag of chips? How would I handle not only the disappointment but checking something off the “list”. What would I replace it with?
Speaking of checking things off, I was under the impression that I’d visited all regions in France except for Brittany and therefore was closing out my France dance card. I wanted to be accurate in writing something and decided to do a quick Google search only to learn that I hadn’t been to Hauts-de-France, a northern region near Belgium. For me, this was fine, for Zeke, it means another trip to France, something he was hoping to avoid. Silly man…just like Trix are for kids, France is for Terri. Always!
Horses to the Barn
It’s nearly impossible to determine what the perfect trip length is as we have both learned repeatedly that there’s a point in the trip, and it’s always the same, when we start looking forward to going home. If we’ve been gone a week, two days before we head home, we are talking about it. With a seven-week trip, it’s ten to twelve days out. We are like horses to the barn…we sense the end and we start mentally planning for the return. Zeke experiences this on his two-week cycling trips too. The fatigue sets in about four days before he’s expected to be home and he knows he’s had enough.
As I write this, I’m sensing that this particular issue is a mental one that we can work through. Just as we build up strength and stamina through consistent exercise, we should be able to recognize what we are experiencing, acknowledge the feelings for what they are, and then work through them. I really do believe this is a mind over matter situation.
This is going to be something good for us to work on when we get back to France after 39 nights. We will be shifting gears, shifting down, as we prepare to visit our youngest in Normandy and then do a little exploring in Hauts-de-France before a night in Brussels and our flight home from Amsterdam. It will be a bit of déjà vu after our spring reunion with them in Vermont after they were gone all semester.
I am sure our reunion will be bittersweet. They will have been gone nearly eight weeks after being home for the summer and we don’t know when we will see them again. Maybe May or June back in California. Or if they don’t come back, who knows when or where?
Whack-A-Mole
Traveling and being outside our comfort zones are easier when the basics like sleep and food are covered. At the same time, just as we figure one thing out, something else pops up. It’s just the nature of the beast and something that we can both accept and struggle with in the moment.
Paris is my happy place, or it has been in the past. I know how to get around. I can communicate well enough to get by. I love the energy. I love the architecture. There’s always something new for me to try or do. And yet in May, it was a hard visit. Paris is definitely overtouristed right now. The locals feel it. The tourists feel it. And the vibe is off. I thought that three nights in Paris was the perfect way to end our time in Europe before heading to Montreal and Vermont. I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t and that was disappointing.
It’s All Part of the Adventure
If it were easy, everyone would do it, which come to think of it would be a really good thing, except not all at the same time and in the same place. We often talk about how important it is to travel and how we believe it makes us better humans. We all do better when we push beyond what’s comfortable and experience something new in a different place. We can never be, and shouldn’t be, the same person when we get back from a travel adventure. Our travel experiences should change us. They should influence and shape us in ways that can’t happen if we stay in one place.
Once stretched, a rubber band never snaps all the way back into its original place. It becomes more flexible and less rigid, just as we can be after an adventure. Maybe that’s the sweet spot.
❤️ Terri