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What Extended Travel Taught Me About Expectation Management
And other lessons from ninety days around the world
I really hate lists.
The world of travel writing is chock-full of them, and I find most of them to be absolutely asinine. I’m sorry, and I’m aware this is curmudgeonly, but I don’t care about your top three reasons I shouldn’t move to Portugal or the five questions you shouldn’t ask travelers. Yes, these are real blog posts I just found online, and no, I didn’t read any of them.
Why? Because I care about the story of the trip. Why did you go? What did you learn? How did you dig into a place, find its soul, and feel your own soul be moved by it? And how are you communicating that to your readers?
Buzzfeed-style listicles simply don’t convey any of that. Hopefully this list is different.
I’ve been asked a few times over the past couple months to write a summary of the things I learned and experienced while traveling around the world during the first quarter of 2022. As you might imagine, that’s a pretty big undertaking. And without writing a dissertation on extended travel, a list is pretty much the only way to do it. So, here goes. To all the better writers than me out there, forgive me for committing the cardinal sin of list-writing.
