Travel Sunday

Running Errands on a Travel Sunday in Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal

Organizational Day while Travelling

Living out of a backpack is an art that needs to be learned and perfected over time. The key to mastering this art is obviously nothing less than strict discipline and organizational skill. So the idea of having an organizational day within the trip, a so-called Travel Sunday, was almost imperative. It came into existence already during the first week of my trip and it continued to be an integral part of all my travels after that.

When I first left home and started travelling, my backpack was much too heavy, because a lot of additional items had found their way into it on the last day before I left. So only a few days into my trip, I decided to pull the breaks and take a full day to assess my situation and do a first big purge of the bag. The goal was to figure out how to travel light with a backpack, and while that was obviously an ongoing process rather than an isolated instance, I still managed to get rid of a lot of things on this very first Travel Sunday.

Packing and purging the bag is clearly only one aspect of a Travel Sunday, and by my own definition, a lot of items related to preparation and organization would fall into the same category. A Travel Sunday could be a day of research for flights and destinations, it could be a day of running all sorts of errands, it could be a day of dealing with bureaucracy like visa applications or embassy visits, it could a day of handling things back home like doing taxes and so forth.

What all of these tasks have in common is that they break up the usual travel routine, just as a Sunday, when everything is closed, breaks up the routine of the week. So essentially the Travel Sunday has technically nothing to do with the journey, or the trip itself, but it is still necessary in order for it to continue travelling. The reason why I am stressing this point is, because it is important to factor in those days when making an overall travel schedule and trying to figure out how much can be seen or done in a certain time frame.

In general, you will realize that the more time you allow between destinations or flights, the happier and more relaxed you will be on your entire trip. Another very important type of day to be factored into a travel schedule would be the one covered on the next page, the:

Travel Daycation

• One day Vacation
• Holiday while Travelling
• Rooftop, Cafe, Park or Beach Day
• Changing Frustration to Excitement

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