Mondays are for Dreaming: Planning for 2011

Yesterday, as I reviewed our travels from 2010, I was amazed at all the places, new and old, that we visited in one year, and I realized that a simple goal of “travel more in 2011” is neither realistic nor practical.

In 2010, I dusted off this old blog, spent time cleaning it up and began to post to it on a regular basis. While the writing here is really nothing more than a journal for me to record my own memories of our travels I do hope that the contents may be of use to someone else at some point in time.

Given those two points, my (current) plans for 2011 are two-fold and, perhaps, contradictory.

1. Get out more, whether at home or away.
2. Improve the direction of this blog.

As I already noted that I doubt we can “travel more” in 2011, my goal of “get out more” does not imply that I would like for us to take more “trips”. I would, however, like for us to make more out of our trips and also of the variety of places within a daytrip of home. I tend to fall into a routine on our travels, visiting our favorite haunts over and over again. I’d like to be more adventurous, expanding our horizons. Doing this involves both more planning and, ironically, more willingness to abandon well-laid plans, step outside of my comfort zone and take advantage of spontaneous detours.

I’ve been building up a long lists of local places for us to visit — I’m trying to remember that this is a list of wonderful possibilities, not as a checklist of things we must do.

As for this blog, when I started it in 2009, I had some ideas on what I wanted the focus to be, but then I abandoned publishing new content not too long after I started. The reason? Too much travel, too boring to post, I’m really not sure why I gave up on it. After we returned from our summer trip to Turkey this year, I decided to dust off this blog and start again. For me, the greatest benefit of starting to post here again has been discovering the world of family travel bloggers out there and learning about new places, new ideas and more.

This year, now that I’ve gotten in the habit of posting here, I’d like to notch up this blog a bit in hopes of making our experiences and lessons learned useful (or at least interesting) for others. I’m a little stuck right now on my “niche” or “direction”, but I hope that by the end of the 2011, I will have had time to come up with some new ideas and implement them.

In summary, my dream this week is that this year I will spend a little more time discovering new places and ways to share those experiences in a more interesting way.

Happy New Year and Happy Travels, everyone!!

This is an entry for Mondays are For Dreaming at Mother of All Trips.

With the Imam at Isa Bey Mosque

2 comments