Travel Tips From A Master

About 2 weeks ago I knocked off 2 more states from my “Haven’t Performed List” and boy were they beautiful. I went up to Massachusetts and performed at a middle school and a few elementary schools before heading into New Hampshire. I’ve heard for years that New England has some great scenery and it was nice to finally put that to the test. There was still some hard packed snow on the ground (much to the joy of my dog who is a snow fanatic) and the weather was in the mid-50’s. Every school I performed for was great and I really enjoyed my time up there.

With the amount I travel I’m often asked if I get bored doing it. I must admit that there are certain areas I would care to never see again (I have to include LA, NYC and Chicago strictly due to the fact that I HATE sitting in traffic with my 1 ton dually truck, the people are awesome and I have a great time at the schools, but I can’t stand the traffic and parking). But all in all I find that seeing new areas constantly piques my interest. I really love to travel. To really get the most out of a trip, though, there are a couple things that you need to do, here are my top 3.

1. Bring the right stuff

   If you spend your entire trip shopping for things that you should have brought with you, you’re wasting your trip and you’re losing precious time that should be spent seeing the sights

2. Plan…but be flexible

   I’ve been around a few people over the years that have every moment of a trip planned out, talk about a lame vacation! They’re more worried about a time table then actually seeing things. Have an idea what you would like to see, but be flexible on how long and when you actually do them. Certain things require you to buy tickets, that’s an obvious time thing, but others need not be so stringent. Last year was the first time my wife and I visited NYC together. She wanted to see the Statue of Liberty. We got tickets went out and…we were quite disappointed. Every movie and tv show make it out to be huge, we were shocked at how small it is, plus when we took the inside tour, you’re not allowed into the statue anymore. Needless to say it was not what we expected and shortened our planned tour of the statue. Instead we went out and saw other areas of New York that had much more interest to us.

3. Attitude is everything

   Maui was my final family trip growing up. My two brothers decided that they were going to fight pretty much the whole time we were there and my parents officially decided that was it for us. We’ve all seen kids/teens ruin a family vacation because they want it to be ‘just another stupid family trip’, so they make it one. As we get older, it’s funny how we don’t realize that many of us continue to carry a negative attitude into trips/vacations we take. We subconsciously ruin many trips because we are mad at our spouse or we’re having a bad day, etc. Make up your mind to enjoy yourself. Don’t allow trivial things that would set you off at home to interfere with your trip. Make a conscious effort to be more forgiving, more relaxed and DON’T STRESS OUT! As I travel around I see way too many stressed people yelling at their kids as they rush to see one more thing. Relax and enjoy yourself, trips are supposed to be relaxing, not to burn you out so you’re more tired when you get home.

That’s it for my major tips on travel. There are plenty more that I could share, but I’m sure you have plenty of other things you could be doing rather than reading this.

Now if I could only get to Vermont, Maine and Louisiana…