It feels like I just blinked and 2010 flew past! So now it’s that time of the year again when we do what Janus did and reflect on the year gone by and the year ahead. Let’s start off by looking at the travel-related resolutions I made this time last year:
- Have more local holidays. We had two local holidays this year (Panorama-Kruger and Hermanus), which is admittedly not much, but was two more than previous years. I will obviously have to keep working on this one.
- Take more pictures when on holiday. I would say the 600-odd pictures taken on our Spanish holiday qualify! Quantity, check. Quality… needs some more work.
- Write more travel articles. Well, this one didn’t happen at all. I’ve found all the creative outlet I need at the moment in writing for this blog and although it would still be nice to be published in a magazine, it is somehow not that important to me anymore.
- Improve a foreign language. Embarrassingly, nothing much happened with this resolution either. I didn’t even make the time to learn Spanish, as I had intended.
- Save more money for holiday purposes. I got this one right, at least. Spain 2010 was paid off long before we went, even with all the unforeseen passport and visa drama.
Hmmmm. It seems like the majority of my resolutions didn’t last quite as long as I’d hoped they would. Gareth has been saying that he won’t make any resolutions for the new year, because he has no intention of keeping any of them. However, I think even though I know many will fall by the wayside, it’s still good to have something to strive for. With that in mind, here are my travel-related new year’s resolutions for 2011:
- Have more local holidays. Since we decided that our next overseas trip was going to be a big one, we are going to take things a little slower this year and save up for 2012. So this year we will definitely spend exploring South Africa a little more. My parents gave us a huge tent for Christmas and we’re both very excited to put it to good use soon.
- Improve the quality of holiday pictures. My recent review of Brendan van Son’s e-book on how to take better pictures with a point-and-shoot camera has highlighted the need to improve my photography skills. I’ve learned some rudimentary basics of Adobe Photoshop, but it would be nice to have good pictures to work with from the start.
- Save more money for holiday purposes. This one will always be on the list. Travelling is a priority for us, having debt isn’t.
- Continue improving the quality of this blog. Blogging is still pretty new to me and coming up with something to write about on a frequent basis can sometimes be a bit daunting, especially when it’s been a while since my last trip. I’d like to improve the quality of my writing as well as the content and would appreciate your comments and advice on the matter.
- Engage more with other travellers on Twitter. I’ll be honest, Twitter is overwhelming. The sheer number of tweets generated hourly by the 20 or so people I follow so far is almost too much for me to keep up with. But the few times I have used it to connect with others have always been very rewarding so far, not only in the amount of traffic coming to my site, but in the ability to socialise with other like-minded people from all over the world. I’d like to expand that community.
Let’s see if next year’s resolutions are easier to keep than this year’s turned out to be…
Labels: misc, new year, resolutions, travel
