Tulum

It is Tuesday, July 22. 5 days ago, I got back from a week in Tulum, Mexico with my girlfriend and 4 other people.

The last time I took a trip, I wrote about it extensively. There were a few reasons why I did that — I wanted to get back into writing, I was alone on an adventure, the material demanded it — and those reasons speak to why I didn’t write about Roatan last year or my week in Tulum.

First, before the wrong impression is given, Tulum is amazing. It is beautiful, with perfectly sandy beaches and blue water and friendly people and delicious food and historical ruins and and and and. However, I was with friends and thus didn’t have a lot of downtime to write. There is only so much one can write about beaches upon beaches upon beaches, though I could have written tomes about both sets of ruins we saw, if I let myself wander.

This time, I was too busy relaxing, sitting around doing nothing, to try and capture the narrative of the trip. Both are good ways to respond to special trips – capture everything, or soak in everything and capture nothing. Finding that balance is increasingly the challenge of traveling – how will I remember?

It is the challenge of getting older and being in that sweet spot where you are self-aware that you want to remember everything because of everything you’ve forgotten but still being young enough where you think you have many trips, many adventures ahead of you. You take the trip for granted a bit, you also don’t take it for granted a bit. Today, 5 days later, it was a wonderful, peaceful, beautiful dream.

Photos coming soon.