After being together for a good number of years, my husband and I still don’t really know how to travel together.
Each time we attempt to vacation, it quickly becomes obvious that we are on completely different pages. He wants to cram as much into each day as he possibly can, running from one place to the next in a flurry of “I must see it all;” I’d be happy sitting on a beach with a good book for a week.
He hates the theatre, whereas I can’t imagine going to London or New York and not seeing a show.
We both love to go camping but he’s antsy after about two days whereas I could stay for a week or more.
And don’t even get me started on shopping. I do. He doesn’t.
So what to do? We are currently in the midst of planning a fairly significant getaway for our 14th anniversary in September. Already our planner versus procrastinator styles are proving to be somewhat contradictory.
But hold the presses – we think we may actually have landed on a way to each get some of what we want.
Here’s the plan: we’re flying to Copenhagen where we will spend three days and two nights running furiously about in the husband-style of vacationing – including, I think, a three hour bike tour of the sights one day – before jumping on a massive cruise ship that will take us to Warnemünde in Germany, Tallinn in Estonia, St. Petersburg in Russia, Helsinki in Finland, Stockholm in Sweden and finally back to Copenhagen.
We spend nine nights on the cruise, and here’s the part that fulfills my brief of having time to just relax: two of those nights are spent at sea. He can’t get off the boat even if he wanted to and he’s surrounded by a floating buffet which means, being the consummate foodie, he can eat to his heart’s content while I sit either by the pool or on our balcony with a good book.
It’s win-win.
I hope.
We’ve hit a little snag, though: what to do in each port. Again, we’re trying to compromise. The tour we picked in Tallinn includes a medieval music concert in a church that I will love. We’re doing a food tour in Helsinki so he can eat as much fresh fish as he wants. I hate fish.
In Warnemünde, we’re going to get on a train for a three-hour trip to Berlin so we can check out the sights, first as part of a tour and then we’ll have three or so hours on our own, during which I suspect we will go back to rushing about to try to see as much as possible.
And don’t forget about those bicycles in Copenhagen. I can’t. I break out in a cold sweat every time I think about trying to keep up with him as he whizzes about. Lance Armstrong I am not. (Probably a good thing.)
We’re still debating what to do in St. Petersburg. We have two days but there is just so much to see. Unlike the other destinations on the trip, we need a visa to visit Russia, something a tour company can arrange quite easily, but time consuming to do ourselves so I think we’ll opt for a tour. But which one?
And what do we do in the evening? There’s the ballet, (I can see that being quickly vetoed), or a folk music presentation, or a bus trip to see the sights under the light of the White Nights. Decisions, decisions.
Whatever we end up picking has to be good because I can’t imagine we’ll be back there again so the pressure is on.
I think we might just have this thing licked, though. Just like marriage, it turns out vacationing as a couple is about compromise. I agree to the bicycles, you go to a medieval music concert with me.
Now, to see if I can get him to go to the ABBA Museum in Stockholm with me. I’ve no idea what I’ll have to compromise to get that to happen. I’ll report back.
