Although I’m most certainly still the impulsive traveller who started out on his global travels determined to do everything I possibly can spontaneously, the more you travel the more you tend to pick up some nifty little tricks and skills, many of which can’t be learned anywhere else but on the road. Some of the lessons I’ve learned as somewhat of a last-minute-planning, spontaneous globe trotter even have me benefitting in more than one way, the most valuable of which benefits are naturally of a monetary nature.
So here are just a couple of the most valuable lessons travelling has taught me.
Intuition Spawned from Instinct RULES
Truth be told; on one occasion I did indeed try to plan my trip weeks ahead (I would have gone for a month or so, but baby steps…), but things didn’t quite work out because I found myself worrying about all sorts of things – unnecessary things. So I swiftly went back to default settings, packing on the night before departure, but mostly mere hours (less than an hour) before setting off and this just works out for me, every single time.
I don’t know how it works exactly, but perhaps the best way I can explain it is in saying that it’s like when one’s brain is in somewhat of an “emergency” mode, your intuition tends to take over – intuition which is spawned from instinct and that is the best kind of “travel-planning juice” one can run on. Pure instinct casts you into survival mode, which then ensures that you don’t miss a single thing which would form part of what you need to “survive” while out on your travels, so I literally just have somewhat of an out-of-body experience and often find myself wondering just how on earth I managed to remember something which, while on holiday, I really thought I’d actually forgotten.
So instinct definitely rules – something which I guess can be applied to other areas of one’s life.
Things Almost NEVER Go According to Plan
Although there are many organisational aspects of travel which you simply have to pre-plan and see them through, like showing up for boarding on time, etc, pretty much everything else which forms part of the typical travel plans of the typical traveller just never seem to go according to the script.
This is where some more valuable lessons to learn emerge though, for example, not very many people know how to claim flight delay compensation and in fact not very many people know that they can actually get compensation for having “suffered” what can often be the knock-on effects of flight delays.
Again, this may seem like a skill or lesson which is confined to a specific situation only really experienced by a frequent traveller; however it can be applied beyond the scope of travelling. It’s a simple matter of arming yourself with the right information and following up on that good old gut feeling you may have. “Surely I should get compensated for the inconvenience I’ve suffered as a result of this flight delay” is a sentence for which the subject is interchangeable with just about any area of life, even if the compensation doesn’t always come in the form of money, as is otherwise the case with flight delays. The compensation could be the uncovering of a much better way of doing something which has consistently given you some problems getting done.
