I plan everything. I plan the amount of toast I’ll have at breakfast, the schedule of my weekend sitcom viewings, and my month in book genres. I love reviewing schedules, itineraries, and plans. If you hand me a map or a schedule, I am in organizational heaven.
I’m really worst with holidays. I plan them to the minute. I have planned bathroom trips and snack breaks in my holidays. Yes, I know it’s hard to imagine, but I am not married.
This time, however, I thought I’d go different. Tomorrow I leave for Ireland and while I would usually have planned every single stop, every single town, and every single pub, I have elected to not follow this idea. Perhaps this is because I have been there twice before, perhaps not.
In any event, I am filled with terror.
So, what are we doing? How on Earth can I not have a perfectly situated travel plan? The idea of our trip is to seek out the local legends that exist in small Irish towns. This means that we will head to whichever town looks interesting and ask the locals about the myths, legends, stories, and creepy aspects of their town. Preferably after plying them with whiskey. This is a scenario totally conducive to traveling without an itinerary and might mean leaving a town 4 minutes after arrival or 4 days after arrival. It all depends. Jake and I have set up our hotel in Dublin and that is it, otherwise it’s all up in the air.
It is killing me inside. Not only me, but my family, who view my cavalier lack of itinerary as something out of a Clive Barker horror novel. My family loves to plan. We love it. Half of the conversations we have before a trip involves the shoes we plan on wearing, the time we plan to awake each day, the path we consider taking from the hotel room to the pool. And I am 100% guilty of this, but I am the first in my clan to experiment with this open schedule.
My sister didn’t understand my statement: “No plan? You mean, no…plan?” Clarification was needed several times. My dad simply ignored my cockamamie statement about free traveling and told me instead about some waffles he had eaten. My mother still hasn’t spoken to me since I first discussed this with her. It may have been too much. Not planning a trip in our family is the equivalent of bringing home a significant other with a bone through their septum.
We love our schedules.
However I must say that while at first this was difficult, I have noticed that without this strict adherence to schedule, things are extremely free. It’s sort of the mental version of going commando (without underwear). I can go where I want, when I want, and leave whenever I want as well. It’s sort of a gift from God. Well, not the god I usually pray to, Chronos, but another one who is far less concerned with time.
Time to travel. And then, who knows?
