Wanderlust

My husband Jeff and I are never truly happy until our next adventure is planned. 

As soon as one trip ends, we walk around like zombies with haunted eyes, not knowing what to do with ourselves until our next vacation is booked. 

We love the planning and anticipation as much as we love the trip. We can plan a trip a year in advance, think about it and talk about it every day, do nerdy research, create spreadsheets, and obsess about every aspect of it until the day we depart. That’s fun for us. That’s the high life. 

Sitting outside watching the sunset with a glass of wine and debating what we will do in Aruba 10 months from now Is an evening well spent for us.

How did we get to be like this? That’s a long story.

In 1988, when we were engaged to marry, we desperately wanted to go on a honeymoon but had no expendable cash. That little complication didn’t slow us down. We were undeterred in our dream. 

We met working together in the office of the local cable company. Adorable, right? Think Jim and Pam of the Office, but cable TV instead of paper. Other people saw it before we did. We kept telling people we were just friends. But then we weren’t. A first official date. Stolen kisses in the breakroom. And six months later, a wedding. 

Our colleagues were delighted about our romance and upcoming wedding. Instead of a bridal registry, we set up a coffee can on our desks which we decorated to say, “Honeymoon Fund.” We told people we wanted money for our wedding for a honeymoon. We already had our own places and owned toasters, crockpots, and such. We just wanted a trip.

A few months before our wedding, we checked on our can, and it had 37 cents and a random shirt button that had fallen off one of our co-workers’ shirts. We realized we had two choices…

No honeymoon. Be responsible, pay our bills, and travel at some future date.

Go on a honeymoon, not pay any of our bills that month, book a cruise and airplane tickets and let the chips fall where they may.

If you know us at all, you know we picked option 2. We booked a Disney cruise, 4 days at sea and 3 days at Disney World, and 4 airline tickets. Four, you say? Yes, because we took Jeff’s daughters with us on our honeymoon. Everyone mocked us about it, but Jeff was a single dad then, and we wanted the girls to know they were loved, welcomed, and included in our new family. 

It worked out magnificently, Premier Cruise Line (who partnered with Disney before they launched their own cruise line) had scheduled activities for kids from 10am-dinner. After dinner, until 10pm- so we had plenty of alone time. The kids were happy going to Mickey’s Magic Show and digging up buried treasures on the beach in the Bahamas with Goofy. In contrast, we had adult fun drinking Bahama Mamas on a hammock on the beach. 

That first cruise bit us with the travel bug and gave us a lifelong addiction to travel. I immediately went home and enrolled in night classes to become a travel agent because one of my friends who was studying to be a travel agent told me that travel agents traveled for free. That was the life for me!

That one decision opened so many doors for me in life. Traveling to so many places we never would have seen otherwise (here’s looking at you, Paris!) and getting the big travel agent job that launched a 22-year life of magic in San Diego. 

We have been on 6 cruises on 3 different cruise lines. We flew many miles back when my airline flights were free, but now, we mostly drive and sail. This past summer, we went over 6000 miles around the U.S. in three weeks and then drove another 2000 miles fleeing a hurricane in September! We have racked up a plethora of hotel points this year in chain hotels and discovered some genuinely unique boutique hotels that you must try, like the Hotel El Rancho in Gallup, NM, and the Highlander Hotel in Iowa City, Iowa! There are wonders to discover everywhere.

We will celebrate 35 years of marriage this year and, after a season of gloominess, we are finally happy because our next adventure is planned. We have from now until November to obsess over our trip, then we will take our journey, savor every minute, and as soon as we get home, we will start planning the next one. We are eternally united in Wanderlust.