WE DON'T TRY TO SEE
EVERYTHING ANYMORE?
When we arrive somewhere new, there is always more to see than we are going to get to.
There are museums, markets, neighborhoods, churches, restaurants, day trips, viewpoints, and probably half a dozen places someone has told us we absolutely cannot miss. Even if we are staying for a few weeks, it would be easy to fill every day if we wanted to.
We usually don't.
That was harder for us in the beginning. When you have gone through the trouble of getting somewhere, there is a feeling that you should make the most of it. If there is something interesting twenty minutes away, you should probably go. If there is a town an hour away by train, you start looking at schedules. Before long, a stay that was supposed to feel relaxed has a calendar full of things to do.
We have gotten much better at leaving things out.
Now we usually pick the things we genuinely want to see and let the rest happen if it happens. We may walk past the same church three times before going inside, or decide that a day trip sounds like more work than we want that day. Sometimes we find a neighborhood we like and keep going back there instead of looking for a new one.
It probably means we leave every place having missed something.
We are fine with that.
Part of staying somewhere longer than a typical vacation is having enough time to stop treating the place like a list. We can spend an afternoon doing nothing more interesting than getting groceries, walking around the neighborhood, and figuring out what we want for dinner. If we see something along the way, great. If we don't, the day was still useful.
That has become even more important now that some of our stays are closer to two weeks than two months. There is less time, but we do not want that to turn every stay into a race. We would rather get to know a smaller part of a place than spend two weeks rushing from one thing to the next just so we can say we saw it.
There is always a little temptation near the end of a stay to start counting what we did not get to. We never made it to that museum. We did not take that train. We meant to try that restaurant.
Then we remember that seeing everything was never really the point.
We wanted enough time to find out what it felt like to be there, and sometimes you learn more about a place by walking the same streets a few times than you do by checking another attraction off a list.
We started applying that same instinct to money this year — not just deciding what to skip, but deciding what still earns its place in the budget.
Scott & Liza
