What’s the Plan?
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in Melbourne for one more week.
What’s the Plan?
What are we doing in Melbourne for a whole month, you might wonder?
We’re eating croissants—that’s our main reason for being here. But we’re doing some other things too. We’re resting in between bouts of fast moving. We’re reveling in English and easy transit and all the mod cons of a wealthy country. We’re catching up on work.
I am considering Antipodean seasons. We’ve been in the southern hemisphere before when seasons change, but it has never struck me quite this much. Perhaps because it feels so familiar here. The climate and plant life in Melbourne are similar enough to the US that it’s confusing me to be in a place where the leaves are changing in April. It feels like it should be early October.
At the botanical garden, wide, elaborate cobwebs shimmer in the sun. I give them a wide berth; I am terrified of their proprietors. There are late roses and early camellias scattered amongst the eucalyptus and tree ferns.
The birds sound like no birds I’ve ever heard before. I walk around humming that old Raffi song, kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, merry merry king of the bush is he, and hope no one is offended that I associate their country with an old children’s song.
We’re also doing some planning, thinking about where we want to go next “winter.” I keep using that word, and it confuses us both, given our current topsy-turvy understanding of seasons.
A few weeks back, I wrote a post that addressed the question of how we decide where to go, but then I got more quetions—what the actual process of planning looks like. Short answer: the process is just as squishy as the logic behind our decisions. It’s a constant low-level conversation, punctuated by bursts of actual planning. Lee tends to do the booking, but I do a lot of broader research, as well as more of the smaller details, like restaurants.
One question I got was whether our planning looks like some kind of a summit between the two of us. At the moment, it’s more like a loose, ongoing conversation, which—full disclosure—sometimes gets a little testy. [Lee is currently trying to convince me to spend Christmas in Bangladesh. He’s gonna have to work pretty hard for that one.] It’s not unlike the way we raised our kids: research, reading, constant conversation, the development and evolution of philosophical guidelines based on changing needs, frequent negotiation and compromise, and the occasional temper tantrum on the part of one or all individuals involved.
It’s currently mid-April (whatever season that is where you are!), and we’re booked—flights and accommodation—through mid-December. Last August/September when we were in Europe, we realized that tourism was going to be unpredictably crazy, and perhaps artificially expensive, at least through 2023. So we got busy making choices and booking things, in hopes of locking in reasonable prices. It’s still early in the year, but thus far we’re pretty satisfied with the results of that flurry of planning (yes, Lee obsessively confirms that the things we’ve booked have skyrocketed).
For the first quarter of 2023, we were busy living the plan, rather than making new plans, but now that we have a few weeks of downtime, we’re thinking ahead again. Flights, especially long or expensive flights, are an important piece of our process and timing—we try to book those as early as possible, so that we can use points (which usually means eleven months out). But looking ahead to 2024, we’re hoping (crossing fingers and toes) that the post-covid insanity will calm down a bit, and we can afford a more wait-and-see approach, especially since we’re wanting to see some places that are a bit further off the beaten path (Leptis Magna, anyone?).
We’re sort of tentatively dividing next year into chunks, each to be spent in a general area (and by area I mean, for instance, Central Asia, or the Bay of Bengal, or the Arab world). We’ll book the long flights as they come available (sometimes more than one, to-from different places, just in case we change our minds), and figure out the rest of the details as we go. During the pandemic, we learned to enjoy a certain amount of spontaneity, and we’d like to have the flexibility to take advantage of bargains when we see them, or opportunities like the Vermeer exhibit I’m missing in Amsterdam.
But that’s all next year, and difficult to focus on when the croissant-shaped pleasures of Melbourne demand my full attention.
Take care,
Lisa
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