Now that COVID has become something more manageable, lots of us across the world are beginning to think of our travel bucket lists for the upcoming year, something we certainly haven’t been able to do for the last two years.
Now is the time to get a little excited about travelling again and to look forward to all the things we want to do in the upcoming year.
But…
In this blog, I am going to show you some ways that you can create your bucket list in a way that it stays motivating and achievable and doesn’t become something so out of reach and unattainable that it becomes demotivating instead. That’s not what we want.
It’s very simple and it comes down to just a few useful tips, no big upheaval of your plans needed.
Let’s get into those tips without any further ado.
Be a little more vague with your bucket list goals
Sometimes when we are too specific about the travel goals we have, all it does is make them more difficult to achieve. For example, if we write something like, “Go to Disneyland Paris at Halloween with my whole family”, how likely is it that we are going to be able to check this off our list by the end of the year? I mean, it could happen, especially if that is a goal that you have had for a while in your family, but there are a lot of elements within the same goal, making it much harder to achieve in reality.
If we want a bucketlist that really works for us, in which we really feel motivated by goals that we can achieve, then we need to put things on there that we can realistically do this year.
Going vague is the best way to avoid disappointment.
Instead of hyper-specific goals, go for something like “visit France by the end of the year”, “do 3 short weekend trips by the end of the year”, “visit somewhere with natural beauty in the Winter”, and so on.
Plan experiences not pictures
With social media we sometimes think of our travel bucketlists too much in terms of how things will look, both to other people and to our social media feeds.
When we do this, we tend to think of things in extremes. Oh I need to go to Bali for the sunset pictures, I need to climb a volcano for the Instagram picture, and so on.
What we should focus on really are the experiences we want to have in the upcoming year. What do we want to feel? And why?
Travelling is so much more than just great Instagram pictures and we need to remember that when we are concocting a bucketlist for ourselves.
Remember restrictions
Unfortunately, if want to create a travel list that we can really stick to this year, we need to remember that some travelling and some locations will still be restricted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Make sure you remember this and take it into account whenever you are creating your list of must-visit locations for 2022. It’s much better to be prepared than to be disappointed down the line.
You can always check out the current travel restrictions on the gov.uk website and keep yourself up to date with what is going on across the world.
(Hey reader… If you enjoyed this blog, check out our other blogs in the travel and nature section of our site for more of the same great content!)