Lower your expectations. “This has to be the trip of our lives, we worked so hard, …” is a recipe for disaster. Things will be different from what you have planned. You will be disappointed by some things, others may just not work out at all. If you get hung up on that, you won’t be able to enjoy all those little moments that make a trip memorable.

If you have to leave the beautiful little Café early because that one big thing on your checklist is closing in an hour and tomorrow you have to leave early for the next stop, you won’t be left with any nice memories, only pictures of things that have already been photographed a million times.

My advice: already make plans for the next trip. Yes, you won’t be making it back overseas in a while, but there is just no correllation between how far you travel, how much you spend and how good of a time you have. I’ve traveled a LOT all over the world and some of my best memories were made in places I could reach by car. The biggest disappointment was a long, expensive overseas trip that was “maybe the last big holiday before we get kids”.

Take the pressure out, this is just a holiday of many more that will follow. Don’t plan too many things in advance, don’t make a list of “must sees”. Make sure that if you like a place, you can just stay a few more nights.

I was recently on a three week trip through Italy, from the alps in the north all the way to Sicily in the south. We stayed for a few more nights on a nice little camp in the middle of nowhere, with no major attractions nearby, just because we enjoyed lying in a hammock and reading a book. We skipped Rome instead.