How to Enjoy a Vacation More Than You Enjoy Planning It

A few years ago, I wrote a blog about “vacationing with purpose.” It included three tips that had helped me enjoy vacations more intentionally.

They were tips I needed to revisit this year.

As we prepared for a recent 10-day trip to England, I realized something important:

The most important thing about this vacation wasn’t what I wanted to do.

It was who I wanted to be while I was doing it.

I love travel planning. Truly. Researching neighborhoods, restaurants, museums, and train routes? I’m weirdly happy doing that. (I took a career aptitude assessment once.  Travel agent came up second, right behind pastor.)

But somewhere along the way, I could also feel myself slipping toward something less healthy… overthinking, over-researching, trying to optimize every detail so that we could somehow squeeze every possible meaningful experience out of the trip.

And honestly, that mindset has a sneaky way of stealing the very thing I’m trying to create.

Because I didn’t just want to see England. I wanted to experience it. I wanted to enjoy the people I was with. I wanted to be relaxed enough to notice things. I wanted to come home feeling grateful, not depleted.

So before we left, I revisited three practices that helped me approach this trip differently.

1. Begin with the end in mind.

Since early spring, I’d been planning this trip. And because I know myself well enough to know how easily planning can become pressure, I wrote an “I am” statement to guide me:

During our preparations for and travel in England, I am focused on the fun of making memories with Chris and his mom and the joy of learning and exploration. I am prepared and present, so that I can be relaxed, positive, and easygoing during our trip.

That statement became a kind of compass for me.

It reminded me what mattered most. It gave me guardrails. If the planning stopped feeling joyful and started feeling frantic or obsessive, that was my cue to pull back and refocus.

And honestly, it helped during the trip too.

On our final full day in London, we intentionally left the day fairly open-ended so we could decide later what we still wanted to do. The night before, we made a plan: a museum in the morning, lunch and souvenir shopping, and then a tour of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the afternoon.

Reasonable enough.

But by the time we finished lunch and shopping, it was already 2:30 and we were tired. Physically tired. Mentally tired too. I had forgotten how exhausting it can be to learn a completely new place every day — new Tube routes, new timing, new geography, new rhythms.

Did I still want to tour St. Paul’s? Absolutely.

But would pushing myself — and my traveling companions — through one more major sightseeing stop have helped me be relaxed, positive, and easygoing?

No. It wouldn’t have.

So we let it go.

Instead, we went back to the hotel and rested for a while. Later that evening, we headed to St. Paul’s just for outdoor photos before slowly walking to dinner reservations at a pub along the Thames. We had an extravagant dessert, laughed a lot, and still made it back to the hotel by 8 PM with plenty of time to pack calmly before our flight home the next day.

And because we returned to the hotel earlier than planned, Chris and I had time to take one last evening walk together. We wandered through a lovely neighborhood near the hotel that I hadn’t seen yet. We crossed a different bridge. Saw Big Ben and Parliament from a completely new angle.

It was quiet. Relaxed. Unhurried.

And honestly? That memory is more precious to me now than the idea of checking one more landmark off the list.

I’m realizing that intentionality doesn’t necessarily create rigidity. Sometimes it actually creates freedom.

2. Plan for unplugging.

I brought my laptop to England.

I never opened it once.

And I’m so glad.

Before we left, I turned off Gmail and Facebook notifications on my phone. I told Chris that I didn’t want to work unless there was a genuine emergency, and he helped hold me accountable to that.

Now, to be fair, I’m already reasonably good at not working while on vacation. But this season of life and work is unusually busy for me, and I knew I was coming home to a very full calendar and a lot to do in a short amount of time.

I honestly wasn’t sure how well I’d disconnect.

But surprisingly, once I gave myself permission to unplug, I really did.

I checked email occasionally — mostly just skimming for anything urgent and deleting junk — but otherwise, I allowed myself the gift of being off.

And I loved it.

I loved not seeing the emails drop down every time I opened my phone to consult the map or check the weather.  I loved not feeling tethered to my inbox. I loved entering a different rhythm for a while.

I think many of us assume freedom means having no structure, no plan, no responsibility.

But I’m learning that intentional boundaries often create more freedom than the absence of boundaries does.

3. Savor the present moment.

This was probably the biggest challenge for me.

Because while we were traveling as a family, I was also functioning as the primary logistics planner. Which meant that most evenings, while everyone else relaxed, I was often figuring out the next day’s Tube routes, timing, tickets, and plans.

And if I’m honest, there were definitely moments when I caught myself mentally jumping ahead to the next thing instead of fully experiencing the thing right in front of me.

But once I noticed it, I found I didn’t actually need complicated mindfulness techniques or elaborate strategies.

I mostly just needed awareness.

I needed to gently call myself back to the moment I was already in.

One of the clearest examples of this happened during an evening performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

It’s hard to fully describe the experience. The setting itself was magical. The actors, staging, music, lighting, and energy of the audience all worked together to create something immersive and alive. It didn’t feel like we were simply watching a play. It felt like we had all somehow stepped inside the same shared experience together for a few hours.

And for once, I couldn’t be anywhere except fully in that moment.

I wasn’t thinking about the next day’s plans. I wasn’t mentally organizing logistics. I wasn’t anticipating what came next.

I was just there.

Fully present.Fully engaged.Fully alive to the experience unfolding around me.

And honestly, those are the moments I remember most vividly from the trip.

Not necessarily the biggest ones.Not the most efficient ones.Not the ones where we “maximized” our time.

The moments we had enough margin to actually inhabit.

We didn’t do everything in England. We never could have.

But maybe that’s not actually the measure of a meaningful experience anyway.

Because I’m starting to think that the goal of a good vacation — and maybe even a good life — isn’t squeezing in as much as possible.

Maybe it’s learning how to arrive more fully in the moments we’re already living.

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