Imagine this:
You are going on a trip with one of your closest friends from college. You guys planned this trip a month ago and created a schedule with details down to the hour (even color coded your schedule because you guys are fancy like that). You’re looking forward to eating some good food, exploring the major city, and hiking some big mountains.
Your trip starts out great. You get some tiring but really fun hiking in and eat some good local food in the first national park. Your phone is loaded with Instagram worthy photos and videos. The next day, it rains hard so you have to cancel all your hikes. Then your rental car gets stolen the same day so you cancel your next day plans. Then you get sick the next day so you tentatively cancel the rest of your plans for the trip. The only thing in return is that you get to sleep in and get some solid rest. You feel like you’re getting better quickly so you try to hike at your second national park before your vacation ends. It starts to rain again but you and your friend are crazy enough to still hike. Both of you guys hike in 20-30F weather only to get great views of clouds. Then your trip is over.
the view after 1.5 hours of hiking. so cloudy.
I hope nobody can relate to this but that was essentially my trip in a nutshell. To fill in some of the details, I went to Washington to hike Mt Rainer & Mt Olympus and to meet up with old college friends in Seattle. It was a 5 day trip and longs tory short, it was a restful time but 90% of our things did not go according to plan. It wasn’t exactly the best trip but it also wasn’t the worst. I had some time to sit down and journal about why I felt like it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. I came down to the conclusion that we were able to adapt to the unexpected change and were flexible with our planning.
Learning to Adapt To Unexpected Change
The mindset to adapt to unexpected change can be applied to many situations, but it especially helps when you’re traveling because something that you didn’t plan for or can control can always happen. It helped us deal with getting our car stolen without completely melting down or giving up on our travel plans.
Now we didn’t automatically adapt to our situation. We weren’t immediately thinking “Okay, let’s start looking at other forms of transportation or how to move our schedule around.” We were in shock. I remember still sitting on the couch inside the community center and just thinking about how much stuff we left in the car (it turned out to be roughly $1500 worth of cameras and clothes). My friend was pacing back and forth, asking and processing the same question repeatedly: “how did this happen to us?”. After about 20 minutes though and with the community center manager’s help, we started to work out our situation. We stopped focusing on our shitty situation (even though it was still pretty shitty haha…). We were in and out of the gym within an hour and a half. The gym manager was super dope and drove us back to the hotel. We were able to get some Thai food for dinner and relax at our hotel.
After our dinner, we tackled our issue with our schedule. Trying to explore Seattle without a car is a bit difficult. We both agreed that we didn’t want to stay in our hotel all day just because we didn’t have a car. We looked at the subway, Uber, and asked our friends if they could help out. Luckily, we had friends in the area who were willing to drive us around so that helped us a lot. We had to cancel some plans because we had to meet with the police within certain areas to deal with our stolen car situation. After coordinating with the police, car rental company, and friends, we got ourselves back on foot with our trip.
On a separate note, I must say this:
If your car ever gets stolen in Seattle, don’t wait for the police to come to you. Go to the nearest police station and directly talk to them there. We spent altogether 7 hours waiting in various spots in Seattle (we were driving around with our friends so we had to constantly update our location). We decided to go to the nearest police station and we only waited 1 hour before one of the managers noticed us and just asked the front desk to deal with our situation.
Be flexible with your plans
I’m quite the stickler when it comes to planning a vacation. When I allocate time to doing things, I tend to think that that time slot is the only time in the entire vacation to do it. That thinking often stresses me out when things don’t go according to plan. Just to show you, here was the schedule we planned for the trip:
And here’s how much of the schedule went according to plan (the blacked out portion was what didn’t go according to plan):
When things don’t go according to plan, I feel like I won’t be able to have as much fun because I couldn’t do that thing at the scheduled time. So I’m definitely working on being more flexible with my plans. I try to now see my plans as more of “okay here’s a possible schedule. We can move things around if things change”. So being flexible with your plans is keeping an open mind to trying other things if something can’t or doesn’t happen.
When it rained out the second day of hiking, we knew that sticking around the national park wasn’t a real good use of time. So we ended up driving back to Seattle way earlier than planned. When we got to the hotel, we also didn’t want to just sit in our hotel room and watch movies all day. We had planned for volleyball for the weekend, but we thought…why not try and see if there was pickup volleyball in the area. We looked up and found several areas that were open gym. Luckily they were starting about an hour before we called so we quickly packed up our things and left for volleyball.
…it can always turn into a good story to tell
When traveling gets rough, it can always turn into a good story to tell.
If you have any traveling stories to share, let me know!
As always,
Be Confident. Stay Curious.
