Where will your next trip be?

“Where will your next trip be?” is often the question i get from close friends and colleagues who knows me well. And the usual answer they get from me is “I don’t know yet,” which quite frankly i don’t. I really don’t!

Maybe because lately, i kinda like doing spontaneously unplanned trips. Just like what me and my friends did last September: Thought-it’s-about-time-we-get-a-US-Visa, Applied for it, for-the-sake-of-just-having-it-without-any-definite-plans-of-going-there-yet, and luckily it got approved. Found a reasonably-fair-fare-to-New-York, booked-a-flight, a-friend-reconnected-with-a-relative to seek for help of finding us an apartment we can crash in for a week and good enough they managed to help us find a-centrally-located-fabulous-apartment somewhere in the East 59th street in Manhattan, just a couple of blocks away from Lexington Ave. where the Metro station is, then we all flew to New York City two weeks after.

And i must say, it was one of the best travels I’ve had in years. Very spontaneous, very unplanned and turned out to be one of the memorable i should say. Probably the fact that it’s NYC, the most exciting city in the world, the city that never sleeps, the capital city of the world and we can name it all here endlessly but i’m stopping right here.

Or could it be the thrill of the pressure. The pressure and panic of thinking where to go and what to do in New York City for nine days with a little less than a month to prepare. I remember sitting at my office desk secretly opening a small window from my work laptop (hoping nobody catches me browsing instead of working) of Google maps trying to pin all the locations we wanna see, knowing how to get there from our apartment and studying the best route to go from one location to another and how to go back to our temporary crib. I can’t tell if it’s because of the destination which is New York (which i’ll be posting a separate article) or the latter, or it could be both, I’m not certain.

I remember thinking of what to bring, what to wear, what else to buy to bring and everything you can think of when you know you will be traveling soon.

I guess the difference is the waiting game. I used to book flights way way in advance. Like when i went to Europe,  I flew in February but my ticket was pre-booked April the year before that and what? I have 10 months to prepare and wait, dreading the days, weeks and months to be over. I had pictures built in my head and made expectations of the trip on how it’s gonna be like since i have 10 whole months to plan and prepare. Not that i regret doing all of that cause I’m telling you it was a great trip as well. And every now and then i still do book my flights in advance. My friends and I managed to cover 5 countries and 8 cities in 17 days including the-long-haul-flight to and fro Singapore.

Well, unlike this recent NYC trip where i don’t have the time to make up scenarios in my head picturing how it’s gonna be like cause time was not what we have.

Going back on the topic question “Where will your next trip be?”, If you happen to click on my I WAS HERE page, i practically enlist all the countries of the world per continent. And as ambitious and far fetch as it may sound, i want to cross-out every single one of them.

That’s right, you read it right and I’m not gonna take it back! One of my favorite quote goes like:

“If your dreams doesn’t scare you, they’re not big enough”

I’m a dreamer and I’m a believer (not the Justin Belieber sort). I guess we all are at some point. And I always work things out and make it happen.

So to answer the question, “Where will your next trip be?,”

I want to go somewhere i haven’t been to yet but definitely with exemption of those big countries like AMERICA where i only covered one state which is New York and hoping i can visit every single one of the states as well.  Evidently, a week in New York is not enough let alone to cover the fifty states at one go, unless I do travelling full time (but you know what, i’m very open to that option given an opportunity. And yes, I’d very much like to do travelling full time.)

Right now, my heart is beating for the following in chronological order:

Iceland

India

Hawaii

Brazil

I’m hoping i can go to any of them this year, if not, sooner. But it’s okay if i’m not able to cause i’d like to leave you with this quote from one of my favorite 2008 movie “The Art of Travel” (i want to tell here what happen in the movie but then i’d like to save it as well for those who haven’t seen it.)

“The art of travel is to deviate from one’s plans.”

So my plans are not certain and as the quote says traveling is an art and “The art of travel is deviate from one’s plans.”

What about you?
What are your #travelplans and #travelgoals for the year? I wanna hear them.

Let’s be friends. Say hi to me on Instagram: TravelDestinationsby7AM and alvintravis1

See you all there 🙂

 

 

Cheers!

7:AM