Goodbye 2010s | A Travel Retrospective
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I’ve been finding it hard to write. There are about 6 post drafts from past trips I’ve taken in my editor, and I have plenty of ideas for my musical theatre podcast (which I try to write out some notes for ahead of time), but I’m having a hard time writing. Sometimes I feel too overwhelmed or I am not even sure where to start, but the decade is coming to a close and I figure that I should address that in some way. Hence why I’m starting this series Bye 2010s – A Travel Retrospective.
I spent my mid-twenties to mid-thirties in the past decade. Travel-wise this was a decade of a lot of firsts for me, and a decade of a lot of seconds (and repeat visits). Looking back and writing about all of the places I’ve been to in the past 10 years would take way too long. I’ve counted approximately 70 trips in the past decade I’ve taken, some far and some near. I’m probably missing a few repeat trips to Calgary or visiting family in Saskatchewan, but 70 seems like enough to choose from.
The number of trips I’ve taken in the 2010s is likely more than some people, but less than others. This isn’t a “let me brag about all the places I’ve been to” series. This isn’t a “time to check off a bucket list” kind of series either. Instead, I’m randomly selecting one trip I’ve taken each year of the past decade, starting with 2010 and ending in 2019, and then writing a post about that trip. I’m not going to repeat any cities or countries if I can help it (except Canada and the US just because I didn’t travel much outside those countries until 2015).
It may seem strange to randomly select a trip to write about, but really this is for the best. If I tried to put on a qualifier like choosing “the most life-changing trip” or “my favourite place ever” or “the trip that taught me the most about myself” or “the trip that taught me the most about the world and other people” or “the trip that challenged me but I am forever grateful for it” then I would be stuck choosing between several trips. And all of the places I’ve visited have elements of these things, so picking “the best” will leave me feeling deflated because I’ll want to write about all the places I’ve visited in the 2010s. And at some point maybe I’ll write about all of these trips, but it’s too overwhelming to do in a retrospective like this.
I’m planning to make this a weekly series with the first post about a 2010 trip going up tomorrow. If I’d been thinking ahead I would have started this a few weeks back making this series coincide with the last week of 2019 but I didn’t, so this series will go into January 2020. I don’t know how this will go. This might be a super long narrative series, it might be a stream of consciousness exercise or a quick short fact-based listicle of the Top 10 things to do in this place (likely not that exact). It may change week to week. Some of these places and trips I may have featured on Take Me to the World already, and if so I’ll try to focus on a different aspect I didn’t cover before. These will likely include my biased opinions, perspectives and personal stories, you know because this is a personal blog.
I hope you’ll join me in my look back through a specific trip each year in the 2010s. I hope this series might inspire you to look back on the places you’ve visited in the last ten years, whether they were near or far. And maybe this will inspire you to visit some of these places for yourself in the next decade.
Things To Know
Here are updated links to every post in this series.
My 2010 Toronto Trip and Why I Love a Quest
My 2011 Vancouver Trip and Why Repeat Visits Are Nice
My 2012 Denver Trip Was Weird And I’m Gonna Try To Explain It But Fail
My 2013 Thunder Bay Trip and How a Statue Made Me Cry
My 2014 NYC Birthday Trip and Why I Like Traveling with Friends
My 2015 Madrid Trip and Going Somewhere You Never Expected
My 2016 Tokyo Trip and Why Challenging Travel is Worth It
My 2017 Connemara Trip and Why A Quick Break Is Good
My 2018 Belfast Trip and My Love of Day Trips
My 2019 San Francisco Trip, and Why It’s Okay to be a Tourist
What trips did you take this past decade?