Perfectionist’s Guide to Spontaneous Travel: First Blog Post

Perfectionist’s Guide to Spontaneous Travel

I realize that a first post meant to explain the main idea of my travel blog is not exactly going to reel in my new readers as much as riveting stories of being chased by a bull in Spain or feeding crocodiles in underwater cages in Zimbabwe. Don’t worry, only the former has happened to me.  However, I really wanted to start off by expressing the vision of my spontaneous travel blog because I truly believe this will create a foundation for my future posts.  

I created this nifty tagline “Perfectionist’s Guide to Spontaneous Travel” because I want to educate readers on how to pre-plan the perfect spontaneous trip so that you can decide many of your itinerary specifics once you reach your destination. Most people will tell you to plan ahead for every trip, and that is entirely accurate. However, I like to plan as much as possible and have all the potential information that I need, so that I can have some freedom to decide where and what I want to do next. Sometimes the dates for a festival that I really want to go to haven’t been determined yet (ahem… La Merce in Spain). Occasionally, I have friends traveling in Europe and want to meet up with them at a certain point.    However, they are using a Eurail pass and aren’t sure what exact day they will be in that specific country. Perhaps, I am planning a trip with my family, and my boyfriend wants to come meet up with me afterwards, but he hasn’t been able to finalize his vacation days with his workplace yet.

My desire to travel this way started in 2012. I had spent the past year teaching English in Madrid.  I planned every detail for all of the weekend trips I took across Europe. At the end of my year teaching, I decided to spend the summer and the extra 3,000 Euros I saved from working like crazy, and travel around Europe without a concrete plan. Because of this flexibility, I was able to meet up with some friends in Berlin and then wake up and decide one morning that I would fly to Milan that day.  I spent the next 10 days touring Italy and met two people on a canal in Venice who became close friends.  We continued traveling together to Florence and then met up again in Barcelona. Traveling this way has enabled me to have experiences that I probably would have missed out on otherwise. So, if you are a bit of a risk taker and a lover of adventure, this post explains exactly how I traveled for three months in Europe without a specific itinerary.  I will never travel another way now, and I hope that I will meet up with my future readers completely unexpectedly as we all continue to explore the world.

In this blog, I will offer advice such as what to pack, how to book flights and accommodations, and a variety of other travel tips. However, my goal is to provide all that information to you in a way that allows you to go with the flow and not have every detail of your trip planned ahead of time. I will also highlight some of the misadventures that goes along with this whole world on a whim* thing.

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* I wrote this post before I even had a name for my blog.  I spent MONTHS trying to figure out the “perfect” name and somewhere around 2:00 in the morning I wrote the finals words… “with the whole world on a whim thing” and bam…there it was, my ideal name for my spontaneous travel blog!  So the lesson learned here is that no matter how long it takes you, don’t give up and don’t settle because you really never know when genius will strike 😉