It is once again time to poll the wisdom of our Posse of Adventurers with an Ask The Readers post.
Psssttt… YO YO! That is YOU! 
Let’s play a little fantasy game and pretend I have a time machine.
Today’s question: If you could redo one of your adventures… what would you do differently?
Think back to your experiences on your past adventures. Maybe you traveled through Europe on a backpacking trip? Maybe you spent a week guzzling Miller Lite in Florida? Maybe you traveled around the world and saw exotic countries everywhere?
But what did you do wrong?
Today, let’s go back in time and change a few of our mistakes
What mistakes caused you a huge mess of money or time or stress?
If you could hop in my time machine and go back, how would you change your adventure? What activities would you focus your time on? What countries would you seek out? What people would you avoid? What people would you have spent more time with? Where would you have went instead?
What do you wish you would have done, but maybe you chickened out?
(Now I know some of you will be thinking, “I did nothing wrong, because I’m happy where I ended up…” This attitude is helpful as a coping mechanism and maybe even true, but let’s pretend you would end up in a better spot… like the BEST SPOT EVER.)
Share your answer in the comments below.
I think in all my experiences I do not have any regrets but improvements are of the plenty.
I would have purchased the Lonely Planet guide!
This guide would have told me all the amazing places to go in Cannes, France. I really wish I left my cottage more, (it was beautiful so this was a hard feat)
My trip to Australia was one epic journey travelling in a van with two other guys! sleeping in the tiniest spot in the back! I recommend all buying your food together BUT if your friends are Europeans and have expensive taste then maybe have the courage to step aside and buy your own limitations. I had much less money then my companions and yet I still felt the pressure to join in on there expensive lifestyle.
A huge let down on my journeys would have to be not ensuring prices vs Quality. Getting the best deal on snorkeling trips out to Great Barrier Reef and Whitsunday Island proved to be the hardest issue at hand. You have to be ready to turn pushy people away and say no I want a better deal elsewhere which is a huge trap in Australia, everyone claims they have the best deal but you have to shop around!
Hope this is a little informative about some of my travels!
What a trip! I can’t wait to get to France.
I’ve spent more than I wanted to in the past too. When I visited Australia in college, I was hanging with an international crowd and there was always someone doing something cool.
I decided at one point to just go forth it and not worry about money. I put like 3 G’s (3,000$) on my credit card and then ignored it for way too long.
Took me years to pay off!
I scuba-ed the Great Barrier Reef too and the Whitsunday Islands were incredible. I still remember a beach with the softest sand EVER.
I don’t really have any travel stories, but one thing I do regret is not going anyways. I’ve had a couple trips planned with friends and because of work and money we ended up not going. And they always waited until the night before we were supposed to leave to say “oh I didn’t know I was supposed to have three days off work for this trip. I only took one.” so I always ended up with three days off and nothing to do (these trips are usually planned for my birthday, so it’s an extra bummer). I feel like I would have still had a lot of fun if I had just gone by myself.
Ooo…
That is a good one, Karen.
I’ve done this too. But I didn’t do it, when I needed it most and I went and had an epic adventure in the Netherlands, when all my buds bailed on me.
It wasn’t pretty at first… I was so nervous.
But it really set the stage for future travels and a level of confidence that I can do anything.
I hope your comment might inspire someone else to TAKE THAT TRIP alone or otherwise.
So being my first ever big travel I went to New Zealand and stayed there for 9 or so months. Loved every bit of it. But everyone around me was going all over the pacific island area and further Australia, Bali, Fiji, Tonga, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam…so and so forth…So I guess I wished I planned more countries. But now looking on it it’s not a problem or mistake at all now I can go back do Aussie then back to New Zealand and then all over the place
During my New Zealand trip I learned a lot about myself, what I like to do and who I like to hang with. Finding this out I had to experience a lot. The beginning of my trip I thought I was the cool backpacker going hostel to hostel spending fortunes. This was my whole North Island tour going place to place backpacking full with clothes? North Island was just a more straight forward bit stressful travelling.
But right when I hit the South Island I met some amazing people that showed me the “other side” of travelling. The stress free, adventurous, free camping, making real connections with people, sharing and just always going with the flow. The backpack slowly got smaller and smaller realized what was important and what I needed. I never knew life could be this happy and good I was on such a natural high it was unreal everything was movie like.
So from this ramble on I really wish I could of known about the way of travel before hand I could of saved so much money for my next adventure. But I suppose you have to learn from your mistakes and I surely did.
Maddie
Holy Balls that is a killer story.
I like that you described it as movie-like, because that is exactly how I feel about that way of travel. In fact, I feel better than the movies usually… You?
I think we do have to learn from our mistakes though… to take things step by step as we continually expand our comfort zone.
Oh way better then a movie cause I am living it!
*Just an idea for an blog.
Getting over “Post Travel Depression”, thats what I like to call what I am dealing with, haha. When your friends from home don’t fulfill you anymore and they don’t have time for you. Wanting so bad to leave and adventure more, even though I am trying to live in the now. Just feeling pretty lonely with no awsome travllers around me all the time. Baaaa
Great idea on the post too.
Been there and am kind of there now. Building up a little social circle here even though I’ll be leaving again soon. It is tough.
A couple quick tips (before the massive post sometime in the future) would be to accept the depression first. Our emotional system must have a low if there is a high… so try to accept it and love it as much as you can.
Then start doing stuff… go to meetup.com groups, go to couchsurfing.org groups, go to coffeeshops and sit in the communal area (they all have one), then just chat with strangers.
Take care, Maddie
Most of my regrets are to do with romance. There have been too many times when I should have told a girl how I felt or just went in for the kiss but I let fear get the better of me and chickened out.
Collecting less of those regrets these days, though. I learned the hard way!
Yo Niall, I KNOW!!!
That feeling I would get after I wouldn’t do what I needed to do was at first… just my reality. I just never did anything about it, so it just was. Then, when I did start acting and going after what I wanted, I would feel really regretful, if I didn’t go talk to a girl or make a move, if I was feeling it.
That regretful feeling of “UGH! I suck and I just missed out on something awesome” used to motivate the heck out of me to change.
If I could redo one of my adventures it would be an adventure that never actually took place. You see, back when I was younger, more naive, and less worldly (you know, when I thought the world that existed was no bigger than my dorm room, the few bars down the road, and the classrooms I stumbled in to on occasion), I never took advantage of the chance to study abroad.
Now, I loved my college experience, but as soon as I graduated and went out in to the real world, I realized how much more I wanted to see. I yearned to travel, and for the last four years, I’ve taken every chance I’ve had to see different places. Giving up a “real job” paying “real money” for an internship in Switzerland, paying basically nothing? Sure. Teaching English in Japan? Why not.
Basically, I’ve been attempting to make up for the fact that I never studied abroad, and in that way, I think I’ve done a pretty good job.
But the fact that I never took advantage of it as a college student, going somewhere awesome with a bunch of the same type of people (basically a roving party of 20 year olds) and paying the same amount for a semester abroad as I did to sit in a dorm room in suburban Philadelphia, still irks me. You can’t change the past….but if I could, I’d be running roughshod over Europe as a 20 year old college student, sipping beers in Munich and wine in Tuscany!
Yo Travis, you hit on an important point with regrets.
You used that emotion as fuel to feed a series of adventures since. This is the most important point I see about regrets… most people claim they never have regrets (thanks to our classic Italian proverb, Live with no regrets). While I agree with it as an affirmation, it seems just untrue. How can we live without regrets when this is a natural emotion?
Of course we are going to be regretful at times, but go be like Travis and let it fuel your current adventures.
So, Benjamin,
I’m a little late replying to this stuff. As usual. Your question reminded me of the time I spent at the wrong airport. When I was in Brussels, ready to head back to the U.S., I mistakenly thought that I was supposed to be at the Charleroi airport instead of the International Airport in Brussels. I was light on the bus fare. I didn’t have anymore Euros, and I was missing one euro to get on the bus to Charleroi. I begged for it, but no one wanted to help me. I went to the ATM and it was working…until I stepped up. The whole machine crashed. So I went to the exchange service and paid a whopping fee to get more Euros. Then, finally, I got on the bus, realizing that I was barely going to get there in time for my flight. When I finally arrived, I rushed to the information booth to ask where the Delta terminal was. The guy there took out a map. On the map, he pointed to Charleroi and said, “You are here,” and then, “And you need to be here.” He pointed to Brussels, where I had just come from. Oh shit. I had no way to catch the plane now. Plus, I didn’t have any money to get back to Brussels. Plus, I had booked my return trip through Expedia and the Belgian phone system wouldn’t allow International calls. Somehow, I managed to call my mother (4 a.m. US Time). The collect call didn’t work until the third time, no matter which credit card I used. Finally, I was able to get in touch with her. She called Expedia, who needed to talk to ME in order to rearrange my travel. So mom held the phones together so I could communicate with the guy at Expedia. They changed my reservation to the next day and me and my boyfriend finally found a way to get back to Brussels. Come to find out, if we had just taken the seven minute train ride to the International Airport, things would have been fine. But then, I wouldn’t have this awesome story to tell.