I’ve given up on taking vacations. I just am not wired to relax like that. For days on end and with reckless abandon.
I am also just not wired to be on the go nonstop, which is another kind of vacation you can take.
I want both. I want a few hours or maybe even a whole day when I can unwind. Read a book, hang out with friends, nurse a cup of coffee for, oh, hours!
I also want days (or hours) filled with walks through cobblestone streets and medieval half-timber buildings (think Honfleur or Rouen), learning local history and those enchanting tales that only a local can know. I want to be the bumbling American who unknowingly order steak tartare, and then really likes it!
I want it all.
It’s taken me 56 years, but I have found a way. I gave up on taking vacations, traded them in for traveling. Huh? Isn’t that a distinction without a difference? Not to me; it’s a mindset. I don’t want to wait until I retire to go places. So I am gong now. And this blog is my way of chronicling these adventures – the great and the not so.
I have worked really hard and built a business that has served me well through raising children and the stay-at-home orders of the pandemic. I already worked from home when 2020 blindsided us all (since the 1990s), so not a whole lot changed for me, although it changed immensely for those around me, especially my kids.
I get it. I am super fortunate.
I have always wanted to go places, see things, experience different ways of living and looking at the world. Learn from people. Working from home worked (and works) for my life in a lot of ways. But I always had wander-envy.
In high school and college I studied French, German, and Latin. In college, I briefly flirted with the notion of becoming a French Professor. I didn’t, is the short story. But I carried on with the French, adding Spanish, and then Danish when I studied abroad in Copenhagen during my senior year at UCONN.
Part of the way my work works currently is that I can do it from anywhere, as long as I have an internet connection and a laptop. And my date book, and my computer glasses, and a comfortable chair, and a desk or table (they call them laptops, but really?). At any rate, it’s backpack-size portable. And these days, hotels, coffee shops, libraries, and cruise ships all have Wi-Fi.
So, yes, I work while I travel. Other people are on vacation, and I get those looks: “Are you trying to ruin our fun? What with your laptop and your mouse and your headphones on the pool deck?” I can hear the comments, even if they are only in the other person’s head as they slow their bathing suit roll to stare as they pass me. Or it’s possible it's all in my head (I spend an awful lot of time there, after all).
At any rate, I don’t have to work on vacation. I get to work—while I travel.
So this is the view from “my” office. Not today, but in the last month. 😊
It’s a table at the back of the Garden Café buffet on the Norwegian Bliss, and I just finished eating a made-to-order omelet for breakfast. That’s my laptop and my datebook. I am wearing my computer glasses and sitting in a comfortable chair at a table. Overlooking the Bliss’s Observation Lounge and Vigo, Spain. Later, I will get off the ship and take a walking tour of the city.
So, I will take that trade. I will work while I travel and carry my laptop on my back. Care to join me?
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