Being Travel Minded

It's been about a month since we decided to start this blog. When we first came up with the idea, neither of us really had much of a plan in mind. It was mostly intended to be an outlet for all our crazy ideas about travel, though as I mentioned way back in the intro, we all have real jobs and it hardly seemed practical to write about something new all the time. Hell, we were even hesitant to share this with anyone partially because we didn't think we'd really have that much to write about. Even though Matt, Katie, and I all have a decent amount of experience when it comes to travel, a lot of what we had were memories of past trips that we wanted to share. For me, this was largely because I knew that I needed to have some sort of creative outlet in my life, a desire I had been suppressing for far too long. But it didn't really seem feasible to have a consistently updated travel blog when we were just mining past experiences for amusing anecdotes. Again, as much as I love writing about travel, I don't think I really intended it to be something that I spent any significant portion of my time actively pursuing. If anything, it was intended as a spark for future projects.

But since we've started this my line of thought has changed. For one, I've actually had a blast writing again for the first time since I was in college. Secondly, it's caused me to change the way that I view some things. I've started trying to be more travel minded with the way I plan my time. A lot of the time this is kind of hard to do. After a week at work, there's nothing I really want more than to sleep until noon on, crack open a cold beer, and sit around a table with a good board game and good friends. I don't want to dismiss the time that I spend on such activities but I also don't want to allow myself to fall into routines that limit my experiences. Sure, it's probably not practical to spend every weekend on a trip somewhere. But if it's something that I love, why not do what I can to maximize the amount of time that I'm able to do it.

My good friend is getting married in Georgia this weekend and Katie and I are driving down Friday night. This, itself, will probably make for a really memorable travel experience. But when Katie and I were talking about it, we knew we'd have some extra time to get back and we decided that we wanted to go for more. We looked at a map, pulled up my favorite resources, (Google and Wikipedia. Can't stress this enough. Travel planner's best friend) and decided we'd like to spend a day in Louisville. Prior to this, Louisville was not a city that would have ever been on my radar. But now I can't wait for the time that we're going to spend there and the experiences I'm going to get to share with you.

And this is what I mean about being travel minded. Sure, we could have drove down, drove back, had a really good time. Or we could have saved ourselves even more time and flown down. But then there's a good chance we would have missed out on an amazing opportunity. The more Turner and I discuss the potential for things we want to do in the future, the more excited I become. Sure, if Bethany Beach 2013 becomes a reality, I know it'll be a great time. But that's a long time a way and there are so many possibilities between now and then and I don't want to limit my travel experience to one drunken week on the beach a year. I don't want to spoil what Turner has coming up, but he too has been infected by this mode of thought to the extent that even though we're going to be traveling apart this weekend, I'm almost as excited to read about his experience as I am to have my own.

And that is the gist of what I wanted to say. I know we haven't become blog celebrities yet, but in a short period of time, just having the chance to write about something I love has given me new motivation and has inspired me to start looking at life in a different way. I know I'm almost sounding too self-helpy, but it's hard to contain the excitement I feel. I have no idea where we'll have gone with this blog in month two or even a year from now, but I sincerely hope that it's all over the goddamn place.

Maybe even Ohio.