It happened in Venice. We had been on the go for nineteen days. We had traversed thousands of kilometres, crossed several time zones and visited eleven cities and towns. Had it not been for the multitude of photographs taken and the notes hurriedly written in a spiral notebook, each day would have melded into the next and erased recollections of the days past.
I needed time out. Or I needed more time.
I wanted to sleep in past 7 am on cold autumnal mornings without rushing on foot to catch a train towards the next adventure. I wanted to enjoy a leisurely meal without scribbling tasting notes or taking photographs of every course and beverage. I wanted time to live the experience. I needed time to just be.
Photo taken at Café Rallye Tournelle, Paris
Sometimes a trip abroad is no holiday. It leaves no time for rest. It knows no change to the itinerary. Not when it took months of planning and a long haul flight to the other side of the globe. There are too many places to visit and planned activities in which to participate.
But there comes a time, after you’ve taken your 369th shot of the day and you’ve settled in the temporary comfort of the plastic seat on the vaporetto ride from the island of Torcello to Burano and you’re watching the colours of the sky and the Venetian lagoon merge at sunset. Then it hits. You stare in awe, tired and motionless, as you silence the voice in your head that nags you to get up and take one more photograph.
Eventually, you do.
At some point, your holiday has turned into work. Your passion for your website has become an obsession. Your adamant research for travel and food articles has encroached on the enjoyment of the experience. It is time to reassess the purpose of your trip.
Finding the right ratio of blog to travel is crucial to leaving the chains of your work desk behind and returning home refreshed from your journey abroad. Yet the nagging voice may be your ally compared to the voice of regret when you’re back home yearning for that missing titbit of information or the photograph you didn’t take.
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If you have a travel or food blog, how do you maintain a balance between your trip and your website? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Ah well still getting there I am afraid!!!
Mardi: Not an easy thing to master, is it…
I’ve started staying longer in each place! It cuts down on my travel fatigue and I feel like I have the time to relax *and* take all of the blog photos and adventures…and still time to just do anything random 🙂
Shannon: That is one great compromise. In my last trip, I felt everything was rushed and wished for more time to see things at a more leisurely pace. Will definitely factor in time to do nothing to just enjoy or as a contingency!
It is so tough to find time to blog when there is so much you want to see — and feel that you need to see otherwise we feel like we are wasting our opportunity in this place. We have come to a sort of compromise, though, over the last three months — we take a day “off” each week to do nothing more than just hang out, cook food, and work on the internet. It actually helps us as we travel because otherwise we get so burnt out that we start forgetting things. As Patrick said yesterday, after a little while, all the Thai wats just start to blend in together.
Akila: Exactly how I felt in Italy. All the towns started to look the same when I distinctly remember thinking otherwise when we were there. I gather Patrick likes to spend time on the internet and share some of the blogging activities. That also helps. I don’t have that luxury with Mr G, though he does some of the photography.
The line is always blurry for me but I set a schedule and try to stick to it. It helps to put boundaries over work time and life.
Anil: Just reading the words “schedule” and “boundaries” in relation to a holiday makes me think it’s become a job and not a relaxing vacation. The more constraints I put on it, the more I feel I’m back at my desk. The blurry line you mention is a difficult one. How much am I prepared to sacrifice? The website or the joy of travel…
Oh man, do we empathize! We’ve been first weeks, and now months behind for some time. At first, we worried and tried to squeeze extra time into the day, and then we just gave up and decided to enjoy our travels and let the blog work itself out at it’s own pace. The sad part about all this is that all the time between experience and finally writing the blog blurs our memories and we find we’ve forgotten some of the strength of emotions we’d felt at the place we’re now trying to write about. It’s not easy to recreate the atmosphere of it all.
Seeing the world with fresh eyes through the camera lens can be a real challenge day in and day out, especially finding time to review all the snaps at the end of the day. I often feel I could be learning more about my photo skills if I had more time to review what I had done, right away.
I guess at some point we needed to decide where our priorities lay, and it wasn’t on the blog. Yes, we’re proud of it, and yes we enjoy working on it, but this year is far too important for us to be sitting in the hotel room 4 hours each day worrying about twitter and flickr and wordpress and … 🙂
Jeremy & Eva Rees: Gets a bit like that with all the upkeep and networking tools.
When we returned from an intensive 5 week trip, I said that I have material for nearly two years’ worth of articles. Now that I’ve started working on them, I relate to the loss of certain on-the-spot emotions or passions that you mention. It’s a small price to pay, but memories have a good way of returning and they evoke emotions that inspire a piece of writing. I too relate to the photography aspect. I barely had time to download the photos on my laptop let alone review the quality or get to know the new camera’s full capabilities.
I’m very pleased you’ve decided to make the enjoyment of your trip a priority. I have been following your travels for some time now and you both have been doing a stellar job on your site :).
[…] Blogs are high maintenance beasts. Maintaining quality travel blogs with good writing and photography takes significant time and effort. Even when the tasks turn into routine, the travel blog ‘originally designed to keep in touch with family and friend’ has morphed into that same thing with deadlines you wanted to leave behind: work. […]