Decision Time
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’ve left Australia (only for a few weeks) to do a little roadtrip in New Zealand. Today we’re in Franz Josef, in the Southern Alps.
Decision Time
Did you know that it’s possible to see large swathes of the African continent on something called an overland tour? Lee is absolutely fascinated by these epic adventures: you spend anywhere from two weeks to many months with a small group, traveling in a rugged, fully-outfitted off-road van, seeing parts of Africa that are difficult to visit any other way. Every now and again he floats the idea of doing one of these tours—I recently learned that there’s actually an upper age limit, so I no longer hyperventilate when he makes noise about signing us up for one—if I procrastinate long enough, the whole proposal will be moot.
Someone recently asked how we decide where to go. It might seem as if we’re just throwing darts at the wall, but we actually have a (very loose) system for planning our stops. So now y’all are going to get a treatise on how we choose destinations, because it’s actually our 2nd most frequent topic of conversation (the #1 topic at the moment is Isn’t ChatGPT amazing, but some of us are getting a little bored with that one).
Major caveat: decisions we made during Covid don’t count, because that was a whole different set of requirements that we (hopefully) won’t have to revisit any time soon.
So, speaking strictly of a ‘normal’ world without border closures or quarantines, our decision-making process is … squishy. Once, years ago, I was at the farmer’s market with my sister, looking for a jack-o-lantern sized pumpkin. She kept pointing to pumpkins, and I kept rejecting them.
What are you looking for, she finally asked.
I’m not sure, but I’ll know it when I see it, I replied.
That’s a big piece of our system—gut instinct. We kick around ideas until a sequence falls into place and just feels right. Another big piece is compromise. Sometimes that means neither of us get what we really want, and sometimes it means we both get what we want, in sequence—I’ll go to this place you want to see, but then we have to go to this place I want to see afterward.
If I had to break it down into a list of considerations, I’d probably start with the weather/season. We ALWAYS start there. ALWAYS. Is that the voice of hard-earned experience speaking? Why, yes it is. Weather has the potential to cause unexpected misery, depending on our agenda. A rainy-season visit to a tropical country might be an excellent bargain, and that might work perfectly for your plans or budget or vacation schedule. But if you’re planning to scuba dive, or you’re counting on a tight ferry schedule, it might not work at all. High season in any destination is more expensive. Summer can be lovely in some places, but brutal in others. Whole regions of the world don’t have air-conditioning. Other whole regions don’t have heating. I’m dying to go to Central Asia (Uzbekistan, etc), but the window of decent walking-around-outside-looking-at-beautiful-buildings weather is narrow, so it is taking us years to fit that region in during an optimal month.
The next big consideration is the previous sentence, above—and this is the squishiest of the squishy part. There are just some places that appeal or intrigue one of us or the other, and for very different, often esoteric reasons.
Lee has an incredibly high desire for novelty. He likes to see places he’s never seen before. He is, frankly, not all that fussy about which places—he just has a voracious appetite for change. I have slightly less appetite for change, to be honest, but I have a very long list of things/places/events that I’m curious about and therefore dying to see for myself, for one reason or another (usually, it’s because I heard about something yummy to eat, or I learned something in a long-ago history class, or read a book, or saw a particularly beautiful photograph).
The next thing down on the criteria list is what I’d call ease, or comfort. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any time at all, you probably realize I’m a bit of a princess. I like certain modern conveniences. I’m not proud of this fact, but it’s my truth, and I accept that.
Lee has a fantasy about joining one of those van tours around Africa for nine months. Long days on dirt roads, no air-conditioning, tent camping. I cannot express how horrible that sounds to me. Like, when hell freezes over, and not one second sooner. Absolutely not. He wants to see all the countries that you can’t see any other way. I just want to fly in for a luxury safari, then go back to Europe.
Because of the ease/comfort issue, one thing we’ve also learned the hard way is that some destinations warrant living for a while, but others warrant only a visit. Check into a hotel, see the thing we want to see, then leave and go somewhere with paved streets and running water.
We also try to mix things up, just for balance—our basic categories are big city, smaller town, beach, mountains. If we spend too much time in big cities, we start to crave nature. Once or twice a year, gazing at a body of water or a beautiful pool and doing absolutely nothing helps recharge the batteries. Sometimes a concentrated dose of sightseeing/culture/tours is fun, but then it becomes exhausting and we need to rest and do some work, or run errands. Smaller towns are more relaxing, but often have fewer resources (like transit, or big supermarkets, etc). Sometimes we’re not looking for entertainment or a great destination—we just need to be somewhere, on the way to somewhere else, because there’s nowhere else we want or need to be at that moment.
And those are the main elements of our decision tree.
There are other factors, of course—can we get a visa? There are some places that I really want to see that literally won’t let us in, or only if we jump through a lot of hoops. Is it prohibitively expensive (see: Antarctic cruise)? If so, we kick it down the road a little further. We try to minimize the super-long-haul flights and huge jet-lag jumps.
And then there’s the abbreviated decision-making system, which is streamlined and efficient: it eliminates need for all this complicated negotiation. I decide. Problem solved.
Take care,
Lisa
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