Because I am so organized in my work life, my personal life is a bit messy. I’ve blogged about this before. I’m not a great planner. I rarely know the details of where I am going for a social outing. However, I will usually have enough food for 12 people. 

Over the summer, I traveled to Europe. I was charged with planning the 4 days we would be in London, and my partner was planning the 10 days we were going to be in Germany. Four days. I could do this. I put together an itinerary that covered the “must see” things in London. Our hotel was perfectly located. I had this. 

The first stop on our first full day in London was going to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guards. Still jet-lagged, we woke up bleary-eyed and figured out how to navigate the metro system. I got us over to Buckingham Palace. My first reaction: “That’s the palace? It’s kind of underwhelming.” I’d seen it on TV, of course, but I still thought it would be more elaborate in real life. We had gotten to the Palace plenty early, but it was already very crowded. We were four-people deep behind the rope. It was hot. I couldn’t figure out where we should be looking. Did I say it was crowded? After standing there for a few minutes, I turned to my partner and said we should go. He looked at me incredulously. “You want to leave? We just got here. I thought this was something you really wanted to see.” 

I thought about it and said, “It’s something that I thought we should see, but I don’t follow the Royal family. I don’t really care. And it’s too crowded and I think there are other things we can see.” And with that, we started walking around the city and saw all kinds of wonderful and weird things that we would have missed out on. 

That experience changed up our plans. We decided to skip Stonehenge. We didn’t go out of our way to see the Glockenspiel in Munich, but did come across it for a few minutes. But that first experience at Buckingham Palace was a good reminder to me of who I am: I want to be off the beaten path. I want to experience things that most people don’t get to experience. I want to walk around and stumble upon the cool and unusual. Sometimes, those sites are touristy and crowded, but most of the places I want to go to are not. So while I can’t brag about going to all the “must see” sites in London, I can share some hilarious stories of all the other things we did experience, and that makes me happy.