Travel Fatigue

And travel planning procrastination

The world is a big place! Making decisions about where to go is hard. (Photo of artwork seen at a shop in Bristol, UK.)

Anyone who has traveled full-time long term knows how real travel fatigue is. Basically, it’s the exhaustion you get from continually needing to decide where you’re going next, how you’ll get there, what accommodation you’ll stay in, and how long you’ll be there. The less time you spend in a location, the more your travel fatigue grows because you have to make these decisions all over again about the next place, while simultaneously trying to enjoy where you currently and also adjusting for what has and hasn’t worked well so far. It sort of feels like the stress and mental fatigue you might’ve gotten while cramming for final exams. (And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the daily fatigue of trying to figure out where and what to eat, what to do, and how to get there.)

And if you’re a procrastinator and a perfectionist like me (terrible combo, BTW), it means you wait till the last minute to do much of your research and planning and then complain about how much work it is. In part it’s because you’re trying to enjoy where you are, but also you’re really just putting off the difficult work ahead because you know how laborious it is. So you maximize your joy now but then inadvertently you also maximize your stress later. I really don’t recommend it.

But I digress. Even those who aren’t wired like me get travel fatigue. Why? The world is a big place. Narrowing down where to go and what to do is hard. It isn’t just about budget or what’s on a bucket list. It’s also about season and climate, access to certain material comforts or foods (or even healthcare), preferences for language and culture, the ability to perhaps travel without needing to rent a car or get on a plane, the need to account for particular desires members of the family may have, and more. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to search for these things. Sure, you can ask Google or Perplexity and they can give you broad ideas, but they sometimes open Pandora’s box rather than narrow the search, and they certainly can’t account for personal preferences.

Anyway, this is where we were partway through our time in the UK. We were tired of traveling; we were burned out and needed to slow down. We knew our long stay in Albania was around the corner. We just needed something to bridge the gap—ideally one location/accommodation for our remaining month so we wouldn’t have to keep moving around, and a place where we didn’t need a car but that also offered access to the outdoors. And we needed to be able to get on a flight to Tirana at the end, ideally a direct one. The question was where to find this magical unicorn?

Naturally, I procrastinated searching for all the reasons I’ve already outlined. And we ended up between a rock and a hard place. To be clear: It’s not a place I ever hope you’ll be. (And it’s a place the family doesn’t want us to be again either!) The lesson here, yet again, is: Plan ahead. This, of course, is easier to do if you’re slow traveling. So lesson two is: Travel slowly; do not fast travel. Stay at least a month in one place, longer if you can. And by that, I mean the same accommodation, not just the same geographical location.

But let’s back up a bit to where I started my search once I finally rolled up my sleeves and dug in: On AirBNB, of course. I added our must-have criteria and opened the search to all of Western and Central Europe (we hope to travel through parts of Eastern Europe from Albania). Not a lot came back. Let me qualify that. There were definitely some lovely accommodation options that met our need for space, number of beds, etc., but they were in villages and towns we had never heard of, far from larger areas we knew would have good public transit. So I went down rabbit holes researching and trying to figure out whether they were viable for us without renting a car. Let me just say that it’s very difficult to figure this out when you don’t know an area.

It was not fine; in fact, it was very not fine

I mean, imagine you’re not from the US and you’ve never even visited and you wanted to pick a place to go. How do you begin to know that a beautiful property on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina is a totally different experience from a stay in Ft. Worth, Texas or Salt Lake City, Utah? If you’re just looking at an accommodation, you wouldn’t. AirBNB provides no location context and you certainly can’t tell what areas have good, if any, public transit. Even if a listing says: “There’s a bus stop two minutes away that goes into town,” you don’t know how often that bus comes, what kind of people ride it, or whether it goes anywhere else you may want to travel during your stay. You’d have to do a whole bunch of extra research to figure that out.

So at some point I abandoned searching this way because it was too difficult. If you’re wondering why I didn’t just zero in on one country, I did originally: Switzerland. In fact, we had a place booked for a week at the end of July and the original idea had been to book something closer to the Italian border following that and then fly to Tirana from Milan. But then we also needed a place prior to our time in Switzerland. I spent a lot of time in late June/early July trying to figure this puzzle out and it came to naught. Switzerland was booked up and I couldn’t piece things together. Every good property in the vicinity of the main areas that didn’t cost the moon was taken for the periods of time we needed. As much as we really wanted to go there, it just became impossible. We’ll have to visit in the off season and/or plan far, far ahead for next summer. (The same for Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic.)

So because there were so few properties available for our criteria that I didn’t have enough to select from, I had to go wide across Europe, which made the search completely overwhelming. In an attempt to narrow things, I started focusing on slightly “less desirable” properties across Europe (ones that were a bit smaller than what we needed or that didn’t have many reviews yet) just to see if that opened listings closer to larger “metro” areas I knew we’d be able to navigate without a car. It did, but nothing was piquing my interest.

Usually when I’m searching, I land on a few properties/places that I get drawn towards and I run with those and narrow the field from there. But I wasn’t drawn to anything this time; everything felt meh. I found myself down rabbit holes researching “what is there to do in [name of place] during the summer?” I tried searching for places with pools, places near lakes—anything that might help us find an elusive unicorn.

I found places, sure, but many were too expensive, or they were decently situated but near loud neighbors (based on reviews), or they had an awesome pool but no A/C in an otherwise hot climate. Chris sent some properties he found that I scoffed at for a variety of reasons. We’ve been lucky to stay in some really great properties during our travels and I couldn’t imagine settling for something dark or tiny for a whole month to cap off our round-the-world travels, especially since part of what we needed was a light-filled, comfortable accommodation we could just enjoy hanging out in since we were seeking some peace and relaxation. And we each really needed a corner of a house we could call our own to spread out in and have some personal space. It would’ve been different if all we needed was a place to sleep because we were going to be out exploring all day. That’s not the phase of travel we’re in and that’s not the way the rest of the family desires to travel anyway (I’m the exception, until I burn out).

Feeling desperate but not defeated, I did what many traveling families do: I asked for suggestions from other worldschooling families. I was hoping someone might have an amazing suggestion for somewhere they’d already been that fit our needs, especially in a more off-the-beaten path location. Lots of fabulous places were suggested—many that were already on our list to see one day—but that I knew from my searches had no accommodation available in our price range. A couple of families had properties to offer and this was where I was hopeful we’d find a solution. And we almost did.

While I waited for responses, I started a new AirBNB search (I tried Booking, too, but it isn’t as well suited to finding longer-term accommodations). While there were some properties still available in parts of Spain near the beach and parts of France outside of Marseille and Montpelier, for some reason we weren’t loving the idea of a hot climate, though access to beaches sounded good but not the crowds they’d be drawing. So we raised our budget a bit and really started considering properties with no reviews. This opened up some options in Scandinavia. We liked the idea of being near a city but not in a city, by lakes and forests, so long as we could be near public transit and maybe rent some bikes. Together Chris and I found 4-5 possibilities and I sent messages to the hosts.

Of those, two became serious contenders. Both had access to nature and cities, and both offered adequate indoor and outdoor living space. In fact, we had a hard time deciding between them, mostly because on paper they seemed similar and we didn’t know enough about the areas they were in to make a more informed decision. In the end, we picked the one that would make it easy for us to fly in and out of versus needing to take an additional 3+ hour train ride.

I can’t tell you what a relief it was to know that a) we had a place lined up and b) it was for the whole month, stretching to our time in Albania, so we weren’t going to need to do yet another accommodation search. I even found a direct flight out of the UK from Bristol, so no need to take the train back to London and stay a night there. I was actually a little sad about that because the girls and I were hoping for more time in London, but since it’s an easy 3-hour flight from Tirana, I imagine we’ll be back at least once over the next year.

So where did we pick for our last month of full-time travel? Denmark! About 30-45 minutes outside of Copenhagen by train. Hopefully, we chose well. Again, when you don’t know much about an area, you’re relegated to trying to figure out what you can glean from the Internet, and that leaves a lot of holes. The house we selected had no reviews; it’s a real family’s full-time home and this is their first time putting it on AirBNB. Stay tuned for our adventures. I’m sure they’ll be full of learnings and reflection.