The joy of (Adventure) Planning

My favorite annual activity has commenced: the acquisition of a fresh, new, empty dry erase calendar showing the entire year at a glance. Woohoo! Seeing the blank calendar is like looking at a blank check.

Yes, most of the days will be a grind in corporate America, but it is all to fund the weekend warrior adventures, which gradually emerge in the little squares of the almighty calendar.

I'm a program manager by day, and have a sort of fetishistic bond to calendars, as some of my friends who have humored me with Calendly entries for social walks, or two-months-in-advance movie date plans will attest.

The promise inherent in an empty calendar.

Also, important, I'm still relatively new to marriage and traveling while married. This year Jason and I are more in tune with our differences: his passion is still for downhill and mine for cycling fitness with some outdoor thrill peppered in.

Lovely Infographic of 2024 Adventures!

But we share the "pioneer spirit" of wanting to go forth and try things. So we are kind of in it together for the most part.

Last year we had quite a few adventures, from a ski trip, to Vegas, the epic backcountry rides of Utahs, triathlons, metric centuries and cross country races.

We also had a blast in Sedona at MTB Fest.

So, with all this said about planning, I have to admit we exceeded our travel budget.

But the good news is, we were able to look at it objectively and figure out how to fund the additional costs as new opportunities arose. We are being careful in the new year to continue to think about trade offs so that we don't stress ourselves out financially.

Here we are in Las Vegas, Utah, Galveston (metric century Conquer the Coast), Sedona, Angel Fire and Bentonville at Little Sugar.

Budgeting for your Adventure Plans

In a previous version of this post, I went into more detail about how to plan travel. As I am a budget/planning nut, that explanation got a bit long-winded so I broke it out into its own blog post. If you want to read more about how to make your adventure dreams come true, read my thoughts on that here: Budgeting for Adventure Travel