Amanda Williams

This one won't really apply if you're planning a domestic vacation, but an important thing many people don't think about during the planning stages of an international trip is to make sure you know what you need to actually enter a foreign country. If you're traveling somewhere where you need to apply for a visa in advance, the time to do that is after you know your exact travel dates (which is usually after you book your flights). I generally don't book accommodation right away after booking my flights – unless I know that I want to stay in a very specific place that might book up. For train tickets and ferries, you'll need to do some research into whether these are things you need to pre-book, or whether you can just purchase tickets on the day you need them.

Desert travel is popular in other countries (I'm thinking of places like Morocco or Chile or Mongolia where you might plan a trip just to visit some of the great deserts of the world), but not many people think of the United States as a desert vacation destination. These deserts cover parts of states out west like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, California, Nevada, Idaho, and even parts of Oregon and Wyoming. Using a couple of my past trips as examples (and especially my past trips to Scottsdale in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona), I'm going to share with you all the reasons why you might actually want to book that desert vacation after all! In Scottsdale, you could plan a chilled-out, art-focused getaway with a stay at a wellness resort, or you could plan an adventurous trip filled with hot air ballooning, mountain biking, driving an ATV, kayaking alongside wild horses, and going to raucous rodeos at night.

I don't know what things are like in your neck of the woods right now, but in mine I feel like things are finally starting to look up. I felt like a giant weight was lifted in January – and yes, I'm sure it definitely had something to do with a little event that took place on January 20, coupled with vaccines starting to roll out in earnest. While I technically was away for 15 days in the last 2 months, I was mostly indoors and not out actually “traveling.” January and February on the blog(s) I don't want to jinx it, but traffic on my main site has been starting to pick up again! I've also finally felt motivated to write and work again after my time away from home, and hope to start hitting my goal of publishing one new post a week again.

That way you have time to settle into a new routine in a new environment, but won't feel like you have to rush to do any of the vacation-related things nearby. Once you decide where you want to go and for how long, it's time to start searching for the perfect place to stay. When planning our mountain cabin workation, my friend and I had extras on our wishlist like a cozy living area with a fireplace (since we were going in the winter), nice mountain views, and of course a private hot tub! Taking a solo workation is of course always an option, but chances are if you're planning a work-and-travel combo, you might be planning to travel with a friend, significant other, or maybe even your whole family.