Notebook: 'Travel broadens the mind'. After a year without any holiday, I decided my new year's resolution should be to travel more.
As with all new years celebrations, a small, or sometimes long, but either way, poignant moment of reflection on the previous 12 months, or even 32 years follows.
My mind travels back to various conversations about Gen Z's and Millennials (of which I am one.. just), the future of commerce, and what people will be spending their hard earned (or easily gifted) money on in the years to come.
Travel, experiences, memories were subjects that came up time and time again. Working in fashion, we were no longer simply competing against other fashion retailers, in fact we were competing against a trip to Cuba, or a weekend away in Paris. People are looking for ways to enrich their lives more and more, as the world becomes closer in some ways, and further apart in others.
Was I missing out? By working as much as I possibly could, and being single, I rarely had a reason to travel, and the majority of the travelling I had done in the past, was actually with work (Moscow, Miami, Boston, San Francisco), so did that even count?
As I watched the spectacle of the London fireworks, I decided, this year I would take note of Mark Twain (after all I have one quote of his tattooed on my arm already)
Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Mark Twain
I grabbed my laptop - poured myself another Jack Daniels with ice, and hit Google (a guy at work had told me a few weeks prior that I should get slightly drunk and just book a holiday). I came across the '48 most epic dream hotels you much see before you die' it seemed like a pretty good place to start.
Perusing the sun drenched beaches, caves, huts on stilts, I spotted the perfect location (cue orchestral choir). The location for the filming of the movie 'Ex Machina', secluded in the mountains of Northern Norway, it was like nothing I had ever seen before.
If I was looking for a culturally rich experience, and exploration of the unknown, this looked perfect.
I want to see if travel really does broaden the mind, so here we go 2018, let's see what you have to offer.
Juvet Landscape Hotel, Norway - here I come.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
Mark Twain