“Circumstances may cause interruptions and delays, but never lose sight of your goal.”
Mario Andretti
In hindsight, my timing was spectacularly awful, wasn’t it? In January 2020, I attended a seminar about learning how to blog and surfaced a couple of different ideas about potential blogs. The following week I attended another seminar, about how to turn a passion for travel into something more – whether it be a side hustle, a writing inspiration, or a different career. I was so excited! I had a wonderful idea and I was excited about the plan. On February 9, 2020, I set up and wrote the first post for this blog. “Trip Hatchery” was…well…hatched! I wanted to keep it to myself until I had a little more content, so I wrote a few more posts, and I couldn’t wait to launch the idea to friends and family.
And then, just three short weeks later, the world shut down. At first, we were all hopeful that it wouldn’t last long, weren’t we? Surely this would pass, and our repeat visit to the Canadian Rockies that summer would happen as planned. And, most definitely, the beautifully detailed trip I’d planned for us to Bordeaux and then to meander along the west coast of France and Spain and Basque country that fall wouldn’t be impacted.
As we all know now, Canada was shut down for a long time and the prospect of traveling internationally anywhere else with all of the uncertainty of testing and local requirements and quarantines just wasn’t appealing to me. And so much was similarly unknown as to how I was going to be able to do my job without getting on planes to see my customers, and without my customers being in their offices, and that caused me to put my fun little travel blog project in its internet box. There were times when I wondered if it would ever be relevant again.
In the ensuing almost 3 years to the day since those dark days in early 2020, so much has changed. I changed jobs (twice!) and we packed up and moved from Austin to the Texas Gulf Coast. We lost our two beloved labradors at the age of 15 within months of each other, and we found another pair of labs, Emma and Grace, who are now two years old. We learned to explore what was close to us and hosted lots of friends and family. But the one thing we just didn’t think we were ready to do again was plan those big trips like we used to do.
Until this past fall, that is, when my husband’s employer gifted him and the rest of her team and their partners a marvelous week in Tuscany and Florence. The trip was fabulous, and I marveled at how well-planned and perfectly executed it was. We arranged a few days in Rome at the end of that trip, and planning that time and then enjoying the fruits of that planning re-awakened all that wanderlust in both of us. We love where we live, and have become used to not having to leave it nearly as often as before 2020. But going away, we found, made us all the more appreciative of where we are and how much more of the world there is for us to see.
So at last, Trip Hatchery is reborn! (Or, re-hatched, so to speak!) And, instead of just talking about our travel…now I can help you plan yours! Stay tuned for more content and ideas, and in the meantime…check out the early posts from the beginning in what a refer to as the “before times.” It’s fun to see that they still make sense! I hope they offer some inspiration to you for your next adventure.