The fastest I’ve ever broken a New Year’s Resolution was in 2018.
Determined to turn my late nights into early mornings, I vowed to give up coffee at exactly 00:00 on January 1st.
Unfortunately I was in Costa Rica at the time, and the nature of festive celebrations in Latin America is that you celebrate by not going to bed. Around 3am, slumping with exhaustion in my chair but wanting to remain a good, grateful guest to my hosts, I ordered a cortado (expresso & warm milk, almost before remembering my solemn vow at midnight.
(Two hours, seven minutes. Yes, my backbone is made of solid iron.)
But really, I hadn’t a hope. When you set a New Year’s Resolution that requires a massive and fundamental change in your behaviour literally overnight, it’s bound to fail. (And forcing a writer to give up coffee is just asking for trouble.)
With that in mind, our eight resolutions for 2025 don’t require mind-bending feats of willpower. Instead, they’re about shifting attitude – a series of gentle course-corrections you can undertake to make your travels richer and more fulfilling this year.
Give them a go – and let us know what happened next!
1. Read The Place Before You Arrive
We don’t necessarily mean guide books. Yes, they can be useful, but a super-knowledgeable guide will beat them anytime. No, what we mean is the words of the people you’re visiting, in the form of the country’s most famous works of literature, memoir and other works. Any visit to Norway should include at least dipping into a novel by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), widely regarded as Norway’s Shakespeare – while a trip to Italy’s Naples should include a read of Elena Ferrante’s colossal bestseller (and as of last year, award-winning HBO drama), My Brilliant Friend.
2. Think Smaller
It’s easy to hear the word “vacation” and imagine trying to squeeze a month of travel into your already-brimming calendar – and abandoning your plans when you can’t find the room. In fact, we’d class any amount of time away as a vacation, including short hops of just a few days. This is the principle powering our new Wheel & Anchor Weekends lineup (with 5-day trips to Panama and the Azores coming up in March).
It’s not the time you spend out there – it’s what you do with it.
3. Find Friends As You Go
If you really want to go somewhere and can’t find someone in your social circles to come along – look outside them for inspiration. Our Companions For The Road program is designed to match you up with someone with similar travel interests (and avoid the dread Single Supplement) – but on trips like ours, you’re only as alone as you want to be. Break the ice with fellow travellers, ask the locals questions, and make an effort to be the most curious person in the room – and you will never lack good company.
4. Pack Lighter
We all fall prey to this one, but – if you find yourself thinking “I’ll take this just in case…” when you’re packing your luggage, step back and think hard. Master the skills of carry-on luggage. Don’t be this guy from Twitter:
ME REGULARLY: *uses the same 3 things at home*
ME PACKING FOR VACATION: “I wonder if I’ll need 4 French horns or 5?”
5. Go Super Old-School With Your Gadgets
We couldn’t travel the way we do without all our modern devices – but that doesn’t mean they’re more important than we are. If our phones or cameras or tablets are having the lion’s share of our unique travel experiences, and if we’re spending all our time recording those experiences instead of having them, there’s something gone awry. Instead, we suggest going traditional – as in, using the most advanced technology humans have every developed, which we just so happen to be born with.
Your own eyes and ears are the best way to make memories you’ll treasure forever. Use them well.
6. Use Your Neck
Do you find when you’re out walking, your gaze drops towards your feet as you get tired? Not only is this stressful for your neck, it’s also missing everything going on around you – and above you. A walk through a busy street is also a walk under gorgeous buildings and a beautiful rooftop scene, tantalizingly glimpsed from below. A river cruise is a journey above a river – and below a sky that seems to go on forever.
Remember to look up or look down, and you might get a perspective on the world you never knew was there.
7. Represent (Or Challenge) Your National Stereotype
You are never just yourself when you travel – you are also an unofficial ambassador for the place where you live. If you’re Canadian, your global stereotype is “being polite to the brink of mania”. So if you’re polite to the people you meet, they’ll nod their heads and smile with their eyes, and you’ll see them thinking, “Canadians are lovely. I wish my country was that polite.”
But if you find the politeness thing a bit annoying, why not experiment with being a little cheekier (in a lovely way) than everyone else, just to surprise them? See what you can get away with!
8. Embrace The Unexpected
When things don’t go exactly according to plan – say, a delayed departure enroute to your destination – there are always two ways to react. The first is negative, and everyone has a story of being sat next to that person. But the second is to recognise the possibility of serendipity – “the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.” You’ve got an extra 30 minutes, an hour, a couple of hours in a place you probably don’t know and never planned to spend time in. So what’s here? And who can you talk to, until you can see the place through their eyes?
This is the start of many compelling travel stories – and it might turn into the highlight of your trip when you tell folk about it back home. Recognise that going off-script is the chance to improvise – and find something special you never even knew was there.
Happy new year!