What Are You Waiting For? 5 Reasons to Stop Putting Off Your Next Adventure
“Low humidity and gusty winds blew the flames in unpredictable directions and prompted a large number of evacuations," CAL Fire officials said.
Responders had reached 5% containment in the rare large January wildfire, and were in an active firefight on Saturday morning, with widespread evacuation notices still in effect for residents in Big Sur, Carmel and other parts of Monterey County.” – Bay Area News Group
I was in utter shock the morning of Saturday, January 22, 2022, when Gigi sent me this Mercury News article about a fire that was raging just south of us. CAL Fire was calling it the Colorado Fire, named for the Colorado Canyon where the fire originated from loose unattended embers, but locals were calling it the Bixby Bridge Fire for the famous bridge on HWY 1 that was in the path of the fire.
Why was this story so shocking to me? After all, I live in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Forest fires are nothing new, and this one wasn’t threatening our community. Heck, we couldn’t even smell the smoke from this particular fire.
The Bixby Bridge Fire on January 22nd was so shocking to me because on January 21st, Gigi, Pappy, Fabby, Itsy Bitsy and I had just spent a wonderful afternoon in Big Sur. We had driven home, over the Bixby Bridge just after 4 p.m. that day. We drove over that bridge, past that canyon less than an hour before the fire started at 5 p.m. on January 21st, 2022.
Less than 24-hours ago, a place of peace, beauty, serenity, and splendor that we were making plans to visit again in the next few weeks was suddenly threatened by fire. Whoosh. Like that it could all be gone as we had seen happen with Big Basin State Park in the summer of 2020.
Luckily, thanks to the fast response of CAL Fire, 10 days later as I write this post the Colorado Fire or Bixby Bridge Fire is 98% contained, never igniting Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, and all roads including HWY 1 and the Bixby Bridge have reopened. But it is a stark reminder that the beauty we hold so dear in nature, the wonder we seek to experience around the world, the places we want to travel to, and destinations we wish to experience may not always be there waiting for us. So…
What are you waiting for?
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There are always a million-and-one excuses not to do something. Arguments, reasons, justifications, whatever you want to call it, life always seems to get in the way of the things we really want to be doing. From everyday little things like wanting to spend more time with family and friends to big things like wanting to save more money or go skydiving. But I feel like travel is one of the things people push off the most. I know that’s true for me.
Even in my family with our TRAVELFUL mindset and constantly on-the-go attitudes, it seems like there are a few trips that just keep getting pushed off. There is always a reason, an excuse, a justification for not booking that getaway, for canceling a vacation, for waiting until next year to plan an adventure. Something is always standing in the way.
For example, we canceled a trip to go to Costa Rica with my family in February 2019 because we were worried about the Zika Virus (we were trying to get pregnant but never conceived, in the end Itsy Bitsy is all we need). Then we were hoping 2020 or 2021 might be the year to go to Italy … but we all know what happened to those plans. Fat Papa and I did our honeymoon in the UK back in 2012, but we haven’t been back to the UK or to Europe since. Why?
Life and no sense of urgency.
We get so caught up in our routines, our stress, our daily drudgeries that it is easy to always think of tomorrow as an attainable and tangible goal. But we forget, by definition, tomorrow is always a day away, always in the future, always just outside of our grasp. And sometimes that is what we need to get through today. We need something we can’t quite reach to either keep us going or to know that it is so far away that we don’t have to think about it and can focus only on what is right in front of us.
That might be well and good for the daily grind and our general survival, but if this pandemic and the last few years of forest fire season have taught me anything, it is that we must start living for more than our daily routines. We must start living for the fun, for the now, for the duck of it, let’s just go and do it!
So here are my 5 reasons why you should wake up, snap out of your routine, and start planning your next big adventure. I don’t care if it is visiting your local State Park or taking a trip halfway around the world. The beautiful thing about a TRAVELFUL mindset is that the destination doesn’t matter, it is what you