Long before we had two rugrats, Lady Laura and I used to do a fair amount of gallivanting.
We've travelled to Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, and numerous other cities across Europe. We have visited North Africa a couple of times and Mexico once. We even wound up spending three months in Cyprus twice.
But a problem arose during these vacations.
After about eight or nine days, we started to feel a little bit — for lack of a better word — bored.
By this time, you know the layout of the hotel like you do your home. You know which restaurants to go to and which ones to avoid. You've probably sampled every buffet item at least four times, and it all just gets a bit lacklustre.
On top of that, I start missing my routine and being productive.
Some people will find that admission sad, and I do not dispute it. They are perfectly entitled to that view. Hell, for years, I even suppressed it by continuing vacationing for longer and longer stints until one afternoon somewhere in the second week of our trip to Turkey while getting scorched by the sun…
Laura sat up on her sunbed and said, "I miss home."
It wasn't that the hotel was bad or the staff were unwelcoming or the food was bad.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
But there's only so much all-inclusive drinking and lounging around you can do before the novelty wears off. At least it did for us. So that's when we decided to cap our European/North African adventures at seven days.
And… it worked.
Our first proper implementation of this rule came after a trip to Dublin to celebrate Laura's 30th, when we ventured down to Morocco the following month.
We booked an excursion every other day, relaxed by the pool in between, sampled every restaurant before the menu lost its gloss, and by the time Day Seven arrived, we were ready to come home and resume our routines.
I've accepted I might just be a bit of a busy bee.
Perhaps that will change. Perhaps it won't.
All I know is that I enjoy what I do and do what I enjoy (for the most part), which doesn't make it feel like so much work.
And I believe that shows in my stories like The Divided Region.
In case you haven't dived into this series yet, there's still plenty of time to read or listen to Books 1-6 before the last book drops.
To learn more, grab your passport and fly on over here:
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