Change of Plans
The summer of travel pivots we never would have done in the past
Thomas here.
Normally we would have stuck to the plan and gone to Vienna.
The plan was set 6 months earlier: a week in a rental house in Gstaad, then on to Vienna. But sitting at home between trips, we looked at the calendar and saw it more clearly. The girls were signed up for camp that first week in Gstaad — picked up, dropped off, busy having the best time. Our itinerary for the first time ever included adult things. Long hikes, even longer lunches and most importantly quiet during the day. We’d built a week where we did fun things without our kids. That’s just not how we normally operate, especially in summer. But something was eating at me: we’d be enjoying a week to ourselves, thinking about what the girls were missing.
So we cancelled Vienna and booked five more days in Gstaad at a hotel instead. It ended up being one of the best decisions of the summer.
It also meant twelve days in one place, something we have never done. If you’d told us a year ago we’d spend nearly two weeks in one town, by choice, we’d have said that sounded too long. What changed was the trip we’d just come home from.
Our trip to Spain changed multiple times while we were there. Marbella was so good we added five days at Finca Cortesin down the road, which meant blowing up our flights home. We were booked on United. The routing that made sense from the new dates was on Delta. Our United credits were suddenly useless, and we paid for new tickets, and they weren’t cheap.
Before that, halfway through the trip, we called in reinforcements. We flew a grandparent, plus Julia’s sister, into Menorca when the family of four version of the trip was getting hard. More on that below.
We got home around early July, and in the two weeks before The Hamptons and Switzerland, we did the reflection. The lesson from Spain was simple: changing plans mid-stream isn’t ideal, but it’s completely fine. Every change we made improved the trip. So why wait until we’re inside the next trip to fix a plan we can already see is wrong?
Changing plans cost us real money. The flight change, the extra days in Spain, the Vienna cancellation that turned into a pricier hotel in Gstaad. It would be easy to read that list as the price of getting the plan wrong. But look at what the money bought. Five more days at Finca Cortesin, in the stretch of the trip that we were loving. Help in Menorca, so we could work and still be present with the girls. Twelve days in one town that we didn’t want to leave. You only get one chance at most trips and in both instances we’d learned something along the way that could make them better ones.
We keep doing this because the highs are what we remember. The lows fade but the highs are what make the trips worth it. And what’s the alternative? Stay home and spend all summer thinking about what could have been?
Now that we’ve learned from this summer’s pivots, how do we book the next one right? That’s what I want to explore below.
