On value, and the smartest money in travel.
Think back to your last real holiday. Not the days themselves — the spending. The flights or the fuel. The beds. The meals out, because you were on holiday. The entry tickets, the souvenirs, the extra night you added because why not. The bag you bought for the trip.
Now add it up. A weekend away can cost a few thousand rand. A week at the coast, more. And the big one — the trip abroad you saved for over months — can run to tens of thousands by the time you are home again.
We pay it, mostly without flinching. And we should: a good journey is one of life’s real pleasures, and time away with people you love is worth every rand. I am not for one second going to talk you out of it.
But here is the quiet thing about all of that money. The lift it buys does not last as long as we hope. Researchers who follow people through their holidays agree that the good feeling fades after we come home — they argue about how fast, but not about whether. Many of us are back at our desks, tired again, before the photographs are sorted.
I have noticed something about us travellers — myself included. We spend freely on the days away, and almost nothing on the parts of a journey that last longest: the looking forward, the way we travel, and the coming home.
And those parts are worth a great deal. In one well-known study of Dutch adults, people who were about to go on holiday were happier than people who were not — before they had left. The researchers suggested the reason was simply anticipation. The waiting, it turns out, is part of the gift. So is how we remember: when we come home and relive a good moment in our minds, rather than pick it apart, we keep more of it.
Look at the maths plainly. The Travel of Life card deck costs less than one meal out on holiday. A whole year of The Wayfarer — the Quotes Explorer with your own journal, and a trip journal for every journey — costs less than a single night in a good guesthouse. And the TravelWell course, a year of tools for resting well near and far, costs less than the fuel for one weekend away.
The difference is that the holiday is spent when you unpack. The way of travelling stays. It comes with you to the next weekend, the next day out in your own town, and the next ordinary week that needs an hour of real rest in it.
What we spend our money on says something about what we value. Most of us, if we are honest, invest in the trip but not in how we travel — in the destination, but not in the looking forward or the coming home; in one week a year, but not in the fifty-one others.
That is the secret hiding inside every journey. The patience of the long road, the attention that notices something new in a familiar street, the gratitude of coming home — those are not only holiday skills. They are life skills with a suitcase. That is the half of all this I care about most: the travel of life. The trips themselves are simply the way in.
So take the big trip. Savour every rand of it. I will be doing the same. I would only ask you to notice that the smallest, smartest spend in travel is not the ticket — it is the little it takes to rest well, often, and to come home with more than a tan.
Dr Alten du PlessisFounder, TravelWell4Life · “Dr Flourish”