I’m currently a little over a month into a planned 3+ months of travel and, as always, I’m finding that solo travel forces me to be flexible about plans and expectations in a way that doesn’t come naturally to me. I tend to over-plan by default and experience a lot of internal pressure to make good logistical decisions. And travel is complicated; every situation is new and there are a lot of decisions to potentially make badly.

I try to be more flexible when I’m traveling because over-planning often leaves less margin for error when things go wrong and less opportunity to pursue interesting things as they arise. This strategy sometimes means that I realize after the fact when I could have structured things better (eg. I could have gotten much better utilization out of my rail pass) in addition to making actual mistakes (like getting tickets for the wrong day).

I don’t have, like, an insight or even a well-formed question here but I feel like I’m converging on the correct amount of perfectionism? I’m getting to do basically everything that I wanted to do, I haven’t had any major catastrophes and things go better-than-expected about as often as they go worse-than-expected.

I’ve heard that some people relax when they go on vacation? I might try it sometime