How To Make Every Day An Adventure

June kicked off a particularly busy summer of travel. In the past month, I was lucky enough to visit London, Amsterdam, Bend, Oregon, take a cruise on board the Queen Victoria, and I’m currently en route to Bali. While I loved each destination for a different reason, it is the layover in Seattle that sticks out in my mind.

Like any traveler, budget is a concern. I try to keep costs down as much as possible and that often means enduring things like long layovers. That was the exact scenario when I flew with my husband to Oregon a couple of weeks ago and we had to kill about 11 hours in Seattle. While we could have looked at it as a delay in getting to our final destination, we instead embraced the time, using it as an opportunity to add to our trip.

In those 11 hours, we had coffee and doughnuts at Pike Place Market, watched the famous flying fish, visited the gum wall, headed up to the top of the Space Needle, and ate at Eater-approved restaurants. And even though it was raining the entire time (obviously, it’s Seattle) and we arrived after midnight in Oregon, we had so much fun visiting a new city.

We continue to seek out long layovers, looking at them as opportunities to explore a new city, meet new people and get a taste of a new culture. We visited the Munch museum in Norway on our way home from Sweden, climbed the Great Wall of China on the way back from Australia, and will explore the temples in Guangzhou returning from Bali.

We tend to look at those “in between moments” as lost hours or wasted time, but they’re just as precious as the final destination itself. That day in Seattle could have been simply looked at as a stop along the way. Instead, it became part of the journey.

Whether at work, home or on the road, the more value you can give to the smaller in-between moments, the more life will feel like an adventure.