Login | May 19, 2024
Unconventional travel tips
PETE GLADDEN
Pete’s World
Published: May 6, 2024
I’m going to tap into my mind’s trusty old way back machine for a nostalgic little adventure I did a number of years ago.
The place was Arizona, where during a beautiful April weekend a hiking buddy and I arrived in Phoenix, rented a car, high tailed it to the Grand Canyon, did an overnight backpacker down to the bottom at Phantom Ranch, hiked out in the morning, road tripped it straight to Flagstaff and then hiked to the top of Arizona’s highest peak, 12,637-foot high Mt. Humphreys all across the span of a highly compressed four-day weekend.
Now I truly believe this impromptu trip remains so vivid in my mind precisely because it was such an impetuous deed.
We now wistfully refer to it as the AZ Low-High, as if it were an acclaimed grand trek we’d completed rather than what it really was an ill-conceived yet successful weekend hiking trip.
Yup, sometimes all it takes to create that permanent mental imprint is to take a chance, do something a bit crackers and step out of your comfort zone.
And that theme has been repeated countless times across my decades of adventure travel, undoubtedly because I’d discovered early on that some of the least scripted and most madcap endeavors, where I pretty much threw away conventional travel wisdom, ended up being some of my most memorable.
And that includes a handful of endeavors which went totally sideways, yet still managed to live on as wonderful, vivid memories precisely because of their unintended outcomes.
So with the travel season of 2024 on the verge of beginning, here’s some tips that might just help you to create a few of those vivid memories that you’ll be reliving in your mind for years to come.
1. Go out on a limb and do something that runs contrary to how you typically operate - aka, getting out of your comfort zone. I, for instance, typically like my travel endeavors to be well thought out and feverishly planned, with plenty of time front and back loaded into the trip to account for bad weather, airline cancelations and/or physical ailments. However that AZ Low-High was the antithesis of this travel philosophy. That sabbatical was a total flying-by-the-seat-of-out-pants approach, which was overly ambitious for the short and perilous timeline we had available. Yet we pulled the trigger and am I ever glad we did.
2. Sometimes you’ve just got to resist the siren calls of common sense. I kind of look at this one as reason vs. emotion. For example, another one of my knucklehead ideas was to do New Hampshire’s Presidential Mountain Range hiking traverse as a one-day hike instead of a three-four-day backpacking trip. It remained a far-fetched idea until a couple of people who’d done the route told me it was crazy and near impossible to do in a day. So that’s when I went out and damn well did it - in 10 hours and 42 minutes. Indeed, choosing common sense brings comfort and security, but choosing emotion every now and then, that can lead to some extraordinarily special memories.
3. Embrace spontaneity during your travels. Spontaneity involves making yourself available to the many situations that can occur during a trip, and THAT can lead to serendipitous encounters. Such has been yet another recurring theme during my years of travel. For example, when a colleague and I were cycling across Canada we’d met a fellow who’d told us to call him for a place to stay when we neared his town - which unfortunately happened to be way, way off our intended trip route. But for some odd reason we impulsively called him up several days later. Well, we ended up changing our route, and wouldn’t you know it we had an amazing time staying at his mind-blowing 300-acre “Canadian Ponderosa” for two days of glorious and unplanned R&R.
Yes indeed, comfort zones, common sense and lack of spontaneity can be the silent thieves of your vacation memories. Knowing this will enable you to edge that much closer to a few of those crazy and wonderfully vivid memories which you can draw upon for the rest of your life.