I’m with Abigail, who writes today about the curse/blessing of feeling compelled to plan vacations down to the minute.
She writes:
I am not spontaneous and I hate surprises. I like knowing exactly what I’m supposed to do and when. This inclination prompts me to invest time and energy developing a plan before traveling anywhere. I spend hours finding bargain hotels, organizing a list of activities, and making reservations at highly rated restaurants after analyzing their menus and patrons’ reviews online. I even designate the acceptable coffee shops to visit because I cannot endure weak coffee.
I feel seen. (That’s what the kids say, right?) If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality, then a vacation over-planner is a spontaneous person who’s been mugged by too many bad dinners or arrivals at restaurants that were closed or had no available tables and then your wife holds it against you for the remainder of the night because it was your job to check and your kid is tired and hungry and Mexico City is getting dark —
Where was I? Right, this is to say that the compulsion for finely detailed vacation planning has gotten stronger as I’ve gotten older. My wife builds extensive Excel sheets for activities and food; to skip this step would be like forgetting our wallets or phones. Our family made a long-weekend trip to Chicago a couple years ago and, for the first time, booked every dinner in advance. No stress, no last-minute confusion and scrambling about each day’s culinary capstone. We’re never going back to the old ways.
In truth, we don’t actually plan things down to the minute, though it’s close. Free time and snap decisions are permitted — during specifically designated windows, per the itinerary.