People sometimes assume travelers eventually specialize — the cruise person, the safari person, the beach person, each with a clear identity built around one particular kind of trip. We've never quite landed there, and at this point, after enough trips to notice the pattern, we don't think we will.
Contrast is part of the appeal
Coming home from a slow, quiet Caribbean trip and then booking something as physically dramatic as Alaska isn't a contradiction to us — it's the whole point. Each kind of trip resets what we expect a vacation to feel like, which makes the next one, whatever it is, feel fresh instead of familiar. If we only ever booked one kind of trip, we suspect even our favorite kind would eventually start to feel routine.
We've watched other travelers settle firmly into one type of trip, and there's nothing wrong with that — knowing exactly what you love and returning to it is its own kind of contentment. It's just never been how we've traveled, and the older we get, the less interested we are in changing that about ourselves.
There's also something useful about the contrast itself. A demanding, early-mornings kind of trip makes you appreciate a slow one afterward in a way you might not otherwise. And a stretch of pure relaxation tends to leave you hungry for something more active by the time it's over.
Different trips ask different things of you
- Alaska asks for patience and a tolerance for cold mornings
- Safari asks for early alarms and long stretches of quiet attention
- The Caribbean asks for almost nothing at all
- A group cruise asks you to be a little more social than usual, and rewards it
We've noticed that each type of trip also brings out a slightly different version of us as travelers. We're more patient on safari than we are almost anywhere else. We're more social on a cruise than we tend to be at home. We're more willing to do absolutely nothing in the Caribbean than we'd ever admit to being in daily life. Traveling to different kinds of places, it turns out, is also a way of noticing different sides of yourself.
Why we've stopped picking a favorite
We've stopped trying to pick a favorite kind of trip, because the honest answer changes depending on the year, the season, and what we're looking to get out of the time away. Variety, at this point, is the preference itself, more than any single destination could ever be. If anything, the question we've started asking before booking isn't 'where should we go' so much as 'what do we need from this trip right now' — and the destination tends to follow from there.
We'd rather be beginners more often
There's a particular kind of humility that comes with trying a very different kind of trip after getting comfortable with another. The confidence we've built up as cruisers doesn't transfer directly to a safari, and the instincts we've developed on safari don't map neatly onto a Caribbean beach week. Each new kind of trip puts us back in the position of learning something from scratch, and we've come to genuinely enjoy that feeling rather than avoid it.
It's easy to get very good at one kind of vacation and stop there. We'd rather stay a little bit of a beginner, trip after trip, if it means the range of places and experiences we get to have stays this wide.
