Stick to the plan. Stay the course. Don’t deviate. There are things to do and places to be.
I love making plans, especially when heading out on vacations. There are few things more fun than putting schedules together to ensure we get to see and do as much as possible when we’re in a new area. I look for museums, galleries, theatre productions and historic sites. My husband seeks out the most ridiculous roller coasters he can find.
Fortunately, he enjoys and indulges my love of sports and willingly drives hours to catch a good game.
When you combine my interest in finding unique attractions with his sense of adventure, it has given us some pretty amazing experiences. Cathedrals to camping. White water rafting to the World Cup of Soccer. Go-kart tracks to the Indy 500 track. Aquariums to amusement parks. Beaches to ball games.
We were talking about where we might have gone and what we might have seen had there not been the travel limitations of the past year. It naturally leads to conversations about where we’d like to go once we know we can travel again or destinations we can dream about for the future.
I certainly have thought of the places I’d like to visit and activities I’d like to try. I would love to sleep under a canopy of stars in Tuscany. It would be thrilling to attend an Olympic event. I have a list of artists I’d like to see in concert. More castles I’d like to tour.
Yet I doubt any of those plans could come close to some of the most unexpected moments I’ve experienced when I put the list away and instead let things simply unfold.
We chose a summer destination three years ago based on the Kansas City Royals baseball team’s schedule and a concert in St. Louis featuring a favorite singer. More correctly, my husband found a new bone shaking roller coaster he wanted to try at Six Flags and sold me on the idea of the theme park because Mandisa would be performing.
The roller coasters were thrilling and the concert was incredible, but there were other totally unplanned moments that come to mind far more quickly. To be honest, some of the most special moments of any trip are the ones that are unplanned. Many incredible moments in life are like that.
They aren’t orchestrated, choreographed, or put on a must-do list. They happen when you step back and simply take them in.
Like the camping trip when our “overnight stop” became our campground home for several days because it was so pretty and the kids were having so much fun. Or the day we decided to forego the sightseeing itinerary in a popular resort area and spent the afternoon sitting at the water’s edge sipping mango smoothies.
I didn't know how much we needed that until we were there, immersed in it and taken by surprise in the simplicity of the moment. Or a prayer garden we stumbled across on a travel day. We had many more miles to cover but we decided to stop … to sit … to be still. I will never forget it.
Although I could be packed in 20 minutes if I was told I was heading to Italy, I doubt sleeping under the stars would be any more incredible than the memories I have sitting around the campfire with toddlers in my arms gazing at the night sky listening to their daddy tell them the Man in the Moon story.
Yes, my heart would pound through my chest if I was seated in a stadium prior to the start of an Olympic event, yet I doubt it would mean as much as the pulse racing days I experienced watching my girls and their friends compete with absolute joy in the sports they loved.
And the concert in St. Louis? Spectacular. But it was the other singer sharing the stage that night that led a worship song—just he and his guitar—that caused the tears to come. A moment I didn’t anticipate. An artist I wasn’t there to see.
The planning is great, but we also need to be open to the unexpected and be sure we allow experiences to unfold differently than we ever anticipated. We just might discover that some of the best things we’ve ever done were ones we didn't even realize we wanted to do. That's my outlook.
