Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Italy. We are going to Italy!

I made brief mention last week about planning a trip to Italy and getting side-tracked planning our Thanksgiving holiday with family instead. Well, ultimately we got both trips planned last week. We're going to Italy at the end of May.

Italy!

Better yet, this trip is mostly free because it's my company's President's Club. "Club", as it's often referred to in sales, is part of the incentive/reward system in sales organizations. Top performers are nominated to Club each year and go on a trip, together, somewhere fun for a few days. Typically it's a beach resort. I won a club trip for the third year in a row at our annual sales kickoff in February.

Over the past several years this company's club trip has always been somewhere in Mexico or the Caribbean. While I hate to be the sort who looks a gift horse in the mouth, part of me each time has lamented, "Againnn?" I've been to those locales many times, and they're easy enough to get to from the US they don't feel that special. I've even suggested gently to our execs, "How about next year in Greece? Or Italy?"

Well, I don't know if they were listening to me or made the decision completely on their own, but this year it's in Italy. And that's awesome, because I've never been to Italy.

Italy!

Club this year is on the island of Sardinia. We'll have 3 nights at a nice hotel there. Hawk and I have chosen to extend it, at our own cost, for an extra night— as it seems such a shame to travel 7,000 miles away and stay just three nights. Oh, and we're also adding a pre-stay in Rome. Rome! We'll fly to Rome, stay there for 3 nights (at our own expense, but we've picked a really nice hotel— and gotten it on points!), then fly a short hop to Sardinia, stay there a total of 4 nights, then fly home.

Italy!

I've been making plans for this weekend. Not big plans, though making any plans feels like a big deal after having basically no plans the past several weekends. Well, okay, we did have our combined birthday party last weekend. That took planning. And cleaning beforehand. But this weekend's plans are plans to get out. And by "get out" I mean more than just out to the store for grocery shopping. I aim for us to get out hiking this weekend!

What's the occasion? Well, it's a weekend. And the weather forecast shows clear skies. That's enough right there. But it's also Super Bowl Weekend. We don't watch sportsball. Instead we make a tradition of hiking during the day of the big game. Where'll we go this year? Ah, that's the planning! I'm thinking a drive up to the flanks of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, north of San Francisco, to hike some of the waterfalls in the area. With plenty of rain this past week and clear days this weekend it should be a great time to visit the falls.

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog and one of the things I most enjoy in life. My travel for 2024 ran right up to within a few hours of the New Year... when I returned from a great both fun and frustrating trip to Panama in the evening on December 31.

Here are Five Things about my travel in 2024:

1. I traveled 94 days and 81 nights in 2024. At times this year I fretted I wasn't getting out enough, that I was traveling less than last year, but these overall figures just slightly edge out 2023's totals of 92/81. It's not at the level of the 115 days I traveled in 2019, the last full year pre-pandemic... though the difference is largely in work travel. More on that below.
2. Over 80% of my travel was leisure. That's up even from last year's 75% and is a huge shift from 10-15 years ago when job travel was the majority of my time away from home. The shift in the ratio is due partly to fewer business trips and partly to making more leisure trips. There's a big element of intentionality in the latter; we've got to plan to spend time traveling. And generally we do, though not always as much as we'd like. For example, we didn't travel as much in the summer this past year as we usually do. It's not just that there was no big trip but there weren't even many weekend getaways. Partly that was due to weather patterns but also partly it was due to us being less aggressive about making trips happen for a few months.
3. Business travel patterns have fundamentally changed. Business travel has only partly came back after Coronavirus. Trade shows are in full swing again. That's what most of my business travel this year involved. In-person visits to customers remain much slower than pre-pandemic. It's because people just don't work in the (same) office anymore. Despite widely publicized "RTO" (return to office) mandates, the kinds of customers I call on work in-office maybe one day a week. They prefer not to make a special trip into the office just to meet a vendor when they feel they can get everything they need in a videoconference. Moreover, with highly distributed teams being the norm, us traveling to any one customer site for a meeting means there are almost always key people who need to join remotely from across the country— or halfway around the world. Thus most meetings are virtual by customer request.
4. I flew 54,559 miles in 2024. That's a step up from last year's 47,500 and the most since I've flown since 61k in 2017 though nowhere close to the 150k+/year I flew back in the late 00s/early 10s when I was a globe-trotting business traveler. Still, with most of this year's miles being leisure trips I'm content being slightly less of a globe trotter. Though as I shift into semi-retirement mode imminently I hope actually to do a bit more globe trotting— but now for leisure!
5. Bucket List items checked off: 3 🪣✔. In the past 12 months I made progress on all three of my travel bucket lists. One of them I completed: visiting all 50 states and DC. I finished that up with our trip to Alaska in June. While in Alaska I also visited one more US national park, Kenai Fjords National Park, upping my count to 53/63. And I visited two more foreign countries, New Zealand and Panama, bringing my tally to 23 countries.

More 2024 retrospectives to come.

I've been feeling itchy to get out. Much to the contrary of the concept of homesickness I wrote about a few days ago— I don't get homesick on my travels— I feel down and frustrated if I don't get out often enough. Our last trip out of the area was at the end of June, hiking Angel Falls and Fresno Dome in the Sierra Nevada. That was almost a month ago now.

We've been looking to reschedule the Fourth of July trip we canceled due to extreme heat. The challenge has been, where can I fit in another four day weekend? Or even a three day weekend? I keep getting critical work meetings scheduled on Fridays and Mondays.

Last night I was looking at my work calendar again and shaking my head. Could I take a day off maybe next week? Later in August? Then it hit me: how about we take a two-day weekend trip, this weekend. 😅

We don't need 4 days to venture up to the Shasta-Trinity mountains and have fun. I mean, it would be more fun with 4 days, but we can do 2. We'll do 2 days this weekend and... who knows... maybe another 2 days a few weeks from now.

It's time to go back to Alaska. Topically, that is. It feels like my trip there was two months ago even though it was literally just two weeks ago. (The last day of my trip was Wednesday, June 17.)  One thing I've been meaning to write about since even before I embarked on the trip is a retrospective on how I planned it: How I finally got to Alaska.

Alaska has been on my list of places to go for years. It's actually on two bucket lists I have: One is to visit all the states in the US— which I've now done, Alaska being #51 out of 51. (It's 51 because I include Washington, D.C.) The other is to visit all the national parks in the US. There are currently 63 parks, eight of which are in Alaska. Until recently I had 11 parks left to go— including all 8 in Alaska. (Now it's 10 and 7.) Clearly I was going to have to go to Alaska!

I've been saying for several years now, "This summer I'll go to Alaska." It's an easy thing to say, a slightly harder thing to do. But it's not logistically hard. There are commercial airline flights to multiple cities in Alaska. And it hasn't been a money issue; not for the last umpteen years, at least.

Too Many Good Ideas

The part that's been hard is the planning. It's hard because it's not simply a matter of, "I'll book and pay for this flight to Anchorage." I want to do stuff in Alaska— fun stuff, worthwhile stuff— not just tap a foot on the base on leave. Like, Denali is there, the highest peak in North America. And countless other things.

Ultimately the hard part with planning was the superabundance of great things to do. I'd be, like, "Okay, we'll fly to Anchorage and drive to visit Denali National Park. But there's also stuff to do near Anchorage before and after. But maybe before, because after visiting Denali we could drive further north a visit another park. But the only way in is via chartering a flight, so maybe we do that from Fairbanks. And...." It became analysis paralysis.

Simplify!

The solution to analysis paralysis is to simplify: reduce the scope of the question. Rather than solve for, "How do I plan a perfect 9-10 day trip to Alaska that hits all the high points?" I changed the question to, "How do I plan a fun 4-5 day trip to Alaska that hits one great thing?" And that's how I focused in on Kenai Fjords National Park.

BTW, this was the same approach that got us to Australia last December. For years we've been wanting to visit Australia, but the complexity of planning a "perfect" trip has always left us putting it off. I mean, it's a whole freaking country and there's so much to do! Last November we decided to simplify: We decided we'd focus on one major city (we picked Sydney), find just enough stuff for a solid one-week trip (which means 10-11 days including travel time), and look for clusters of enjoyable things within a 2-3 hour driving radius. It worked. It worked beautifully. And of course we'll have to go back to Australia at least a few more times to see & do everything we want to see & do. Just like we're going to need to visit Alaska a few more times. But that's the strength of the approach rather than it's weakness— because now we've been there once and have better insights on how to go back!

Going into this past weekend, Memorial Day weekend, I was disappointed that we hadn't planned travel anywhere. As I noted Friday night, it was a combination of factors. We were tired from previous trips, we didn't get around to trying to plan anything until late, and by then prices and availability for the destinations we were considering were poor. So we decided to stay home, a disappointment given how much I like to seize the day when there's a free day off from work and go traveling. Of course, we didn't exactly spend the weekend at home; we went out all three days! And that made it a good weekend.

To recap:

• Saturday we hiked Zim Zim Falls. Just getting there seemed like half the adventure, with the location in a remote corner of Napa County 2.5 hours away. Then the hike was epic, with 9 water crossings. Each way. We got home just after dusk, about 8:30pm, and thought about enjoying an evening soak in the hot tub, but were too tired.


• Sunday we mostly took it easy, recovering from Zim Zim while running some errands shopping around lunch. But wanderlust caught us again by mid-afternoon. We drove out to nearby Alviso for a short hike around the otherworldly salt ponds. Later in the afternoon back home there was still time to lounge around the pool and hot tub.


• Monday we weren't sure if we'd go out for another hike but we did! After taking it easy at home much of the morning we pulled plans together quickly. By 10:55am we'd agreed on a hike at Henry Coe State Park, and by 11:20am we were packing the car to roll out.

I love it when we can manage a stay-home weekend but pack it full as if we'd traveled somewhere. Because then it's also a take-it-easy weekend since we don't actually have to travel.

For years now I've had a bucket list goal of visiting all the states in the US. After notching Alabama, number 49 out of 51 in 2016, I remained stuck at 49/51 for several years. (I'm using 51 because I'm counting Washington, D.C. in addition to the well-known fact of 50 states in the US.) Last year I reached 50/51 by visiting Louisiana. That left only "The Last Frontier" of the US— no, not outer space; that's the final frontier— Alaska. And now I've got plans laid in to visit Alaska in June.

We'll visit Alaska for a 5 day trip in June. We'll fly to Anchorage; it's a 5 hour flight non-stop from San Francisco. Once in Anchorage we'll rent a car and drive out to Seward, AK.

Why Seward? There's nothing to recommend that podunk little town except that it's right outside Kenai Fjords National Park. So this trip will serve two bucket list items: getting me to 51/51 states and adding another national park on my national park bucket list. It'll be national park number 53 out of 63. We'll spend a few days visiting the park, both on foot— we'll hike to a glacier!— and by boat, where we'll see more glaciers.

One thing that's struck me as we've made our bookings is how expensive everything is in Alaska. Decent hotels in Anchorage start above $300/night and go up from there. (We're staying one night in Anchorage after a late evening flight.) Rental cars are $200/day. And no, these are not last-minute prices; I was booking 7 weeks ahead. I tried dates in July and August to sanity-check if we'd just chosen the wrong time to visit, but no, Alaska's always expensive.

"What's our alternative?" I asked myself rhetorically multiple times as I choked on the prices. "The only alternative is we don't go." So we'll pay the price to complete our all-the-states bucket list. And notch one more national park.

Yesterday we spent a lot of time planning our upcoming trip to New Zealand. It took longer than I thought, and still we weren't done. Sometimes, though, a goal seems so far away for so long you don't realize how close you're getting. I know that's true when hiking a mountain. Like at Flag Hill the weekend before last, the summit towers above and gets closer so gradually that it's hard to tell you're even halfway up until you're 90% of the way up. This evening it struck me with planning this trip that we only had to book 5 more nights of hotels and make a few decisions on tour tickets— and we had leads on both. "We can finish this tonight, after dinner," I told Hawk. "I think we can knock it out in 45 minutes."

Well, like everything else in planning this trip, it took more than the 45 minutes I forecast. There was some re-planning of stuff we already thought was done. Three steps forward, two steps back. But now we're done! ...Well, kind of. Like my grandfather's "completed" crossword puzzles, there's a letter in every box. They may even be the right letters. 😅

What I mean by that is that though all our flights, cars, and hotel nights are booked, and we have short-lists of things to do every day— there's "a letter in every box"— we'll almost certainly end up re-planning things. But it feels good to know that we're done enough with the planning we could pretty much just stop here and wait to start enjoying the trip. Only 12 more days until we leave!

We're going to New Zealand! That's so exciting. We booked our flights to/from Auckland, NZ three weeks ago. And then we... did nothing... for two weeks. 😨

The obvious problem here (I hope it's obvious) is that a two-week trip to a foreign country takes more planning— way more planning— than just booking the flights in & out two weeks apart. It takes researching things to do and places to go. It takes booking 14 nights of hotels, plus cars, ferries, and domestic flights to get around the country.

We kind of suck at planning. ...I mean, we suck at buckling down to actually do the planning. Once we actually make plans they're generally pretty awesome plans. We've always had great trips, whether shorter or longer. But we've got to stop procrastinating.

Two weeks after booking the basic flights in/out we did start making additional plans. That was a week ago. We converged on the shape of a plan for travel within NZ. We booked two domestic flights as part of that, plus a rental car for 1 of the two weeks, plus a few nights of hotels. Then this past week we booked out another several nights of hotels. But we're not done yet.

We're making today our "Get It Done" day. I've started a Google doc to track all of our plans and booking details. That way Hawk and I can keep the details centralized while each of us making some of the bookings. Plus once we're in NZ both of us will have all the details in case one of us is sick or asleep or can't take the lead for whatever reason. Okay, so the Google doc is created, and I've filled in the stuff we've booked so far... but we still have a lot more bookings to make.

Hawk and I have been discussing where to go on an April trip for months. Originally it was going to be a February trip, but by early January we hadn't planned anything and our work schedules were looking like they'd be too busy, so we vaguely pushed it out from February to April. When Hawk found out in late January that her position at work is being eliminated and negotiated a last day of April 5, we started talking about taking a trip immediately after her end date as time off wouldn't be a challenge for her. And it would be a nice break before she starts any new job. But then we kicked that can down the road for another month, not bothering to plan anything. Until today.

NEW ZEALAND!

We're going to New Zealand. We booked the flights this afternoon. We're going for two weeks. We don't have anything else about the trip planned yet. We'll figure that out in the coming few weeks.

New Zealand!

How did we pick New Zealand? It's kind of like how we picked Australia in November for our December trip. We knew we wanted to go on a special vacation but we'd been kicking the can down the road for months on deciding where. We started with the idea of something tropical, particularly Samoa and Fiji— an idea we'd postponed from the December trip until this year. Then, while we were looking at how to piece together a South Pacific islands trip today, Hawk noted that with my upcoming club trip we'll likely be going somewhere tropical in May. Taking beach-y trips two months in a row would be too much of the same thing, we agreed. Then Hawk found flights on good points rates to Australia and New Zealand. Well, even though we've seen only a bit of Australia and would go somewhere else this trip, New Zealand is totally new to us.

New Zealand!