I’ve been plotting out a trip we’ll be taking later and I had things pretty well set in my mind.

Until I checked trains. And planes. And even buses. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent trying to get from one particular city to nearly any other place without spending gobs of hours dealing with transportation and spending gobs of money to make it even more annoying. It was headache inducing for sure.

The problem was we had a certain direction of travel in mind. And we even had one specific city we thought we could make work. We thought it was a done deal that THAT was where we were going. So I continued to try and see how I could put the puzzle together in a reasonable way. I use Rome2Rio a lot, and it was suggesting things I simply didn’t want to do. R2R is handy, but sometimes it doesn’t solve my problem. Especially because no note pops up saying, “You are really silly to think you can get from A to Z so easily. Why don’t you try going to B instead?!”

I also use the Rick Steves travel forum and even (ugh, I really do have to leave FB at some point) the Facebook page. (Side note: his Facebook page is getting rather ugly these days, what with name calling between those who are infatuated with a certain president and others who aren’t.)

Today, though, I looked again at that one particular (and problematic) city. I decided to check out the Direct Flights site I sometimes visit. I had been there before, but this time I carefully wrote down EVERY city to which we could fly directly and, lo and behold, a lightbulb went on.

It was about giving up the city — and even the country — we both thought we were going to reach. It was about altering, in fact, the remainder of the trip until our already schedule flight back. And suddenly it all made sense. It all just FIT!

I love when this happens. I love that we work around trains (and in this case one plane) and can alter what we are doing to make the trip less about time spent getting from here to there and more time being THERE.

I’m just a little bit excited now. Can you tell?