“I miss travelling. We don’t travel as much as before anymore,” I complained to the husband while suffering cabin fever.
“Are you kidding? Most Dutch go on one long vacation a year, usually camping in France or Spain. We’re going to three Southeast Asian countries,” he answered looking at me like I am some kind of spoiled millennial.
If you put things in perspective in a way my husband does, I do sound like a spoiled millennial. But I did travel a lot more before, going on weekend trips once a month and business trips several times a year. That was two years ago. I don’t know when but at some point travel got too tiring.
Packing for another trip while your luggage from the last one is still lying in the corner of your living room still unpacked is not fun.
It somehow diminished the experience. After all, I’m not the kind of traveller who jumps from one city to the other, takes photos of one landmark to the next or gets crazy with must-see and to-do lists. I am slow traveller. So slow that I can just spend the whole morning eating breakfast, drinking wine and looking at a river flow under a bridge.
2016 had been a great year in terms of travel. Robin and I were together in all of the trips we took this year. It bonded us again, like it did nine years ago when we went to Palawan for a 3-week assignment. We discovered new places, re-visited old favourites and got reminded of how we were before we fell in love.
So here’s a recap of my 2016 in travel, a year I’d looked back with some tears but mostly smiles.