Tourists vs Adventurers

The original plan for our first 3 weeks of January was to balance tourist like activities (mostly focused on American History for school) with adventure activities. We were headed to St. Augustine for a week to surf, bike and explore the Historic sights. Ditto for Savannah. Charleston would be a short 3 days with just biking and Historic sights.

Thanks to the ARCTIC CHILL that brought high winds and freezing temps to the south east, we spent the first 9 days of January wearing every piece of fleece we owned and even pulled out the emergency duffle bag with our down jackets, hats & mitts (I had packed this for winter nights in high mountainous areas – NOT the southeastern coast!). We definitely weren’t going surfing or biking.

St. Augustine went from 7 days to 3, Savannah went from 7 days to 3 and Charleston has gone from 3 to 4. 100% of our time has been spent being tourists because you can still wander around forts and museums in the rain and the cold. This has been a real shift to our travelling “style”.

When I shared the tourists vs adventurers observation, Hunter asked if it was “bad” that we were being tourists… No – just different.

A few observations from the last 10 days as tourists:

• It is much more scheduled than being an adventurer – needing to be certain places at certain times
• It is generally more expensive than being an adventurer – entry fees, tour fees, restaurants because we are either away from the camper for an extended time or rushed between activities. As we own all of our toys already, there really isn’t much of a cost to our adventuring
• Learning is fun yet harder to do as a family, with everyone reading and understanding at different speeds, and having different areas of interest
• It is harder for us to sustain as everyone feels rushed and overloaded
• No matter how much we walk around as part of our tourist day, it doesn’t feel like we are being active compared to our adventure days

We are really glad that we’ve played tourist. We’ve learned an incredible amount about American History from the 1700’s through to the 1900’s and it has set a great foundation for so many other things that we are going to learn about this year.

We will have another week of playing tourist when we hit New Orleans in late January. It will be important for us to find some good adventure time between now and then to recharge!