FIELD NOTES: Permission Trips (The travel system that stopped making me wait for someone else to want the same trip I did)

The Situation

There are trips I want to take that nobody else in my life necessarily wants to take.

Or wants to take right now.

Or wants to take in the same way I do.

For years, that could quietly turn into waiting.

Waiting for schedules to line up.

Waiting for someone else to get excited about the destination.

Waiting until a trip made sense for everybody.

Then I started giving myself permission to go anyway.

Hence: Permission Trips.

They aren’t vacations from my family.

They aren’t declarations of independence.

And they definitely aren’t retreats where I arrive expecting to “find myself.”

They are simply trips I am allowed to take because something makes me deeply curious and I don’t need another person to validate that curiosity before I follow it.

The System

The trip has to give me a reason to go beyond “this place looks nice.”

There is usually something at the center of it: cooking, literature, culture, art, history, wildlife, learning some very specific thing.

And because I’m not particularly interested in spending two weeks completely alone, I usually pair some independent travel with a structured experience.

A few days where the place is mine.

Then a group with a reason to gather.

That combination has mattered.

Nice gave me wandering, oysters, open windows, and mornings when I simply walked out the door.

Cook Camp gave me seventeen people gathered around food, markets, classes, pool rosé and dinners nobody seemed willing to end.

Neither had to carry the entire trip.

Together, they did.

What Actually Worked

The best Permission Trips so far have had a few things in common.

A real shared purpose. We are cooking, learning, exploring, reading, hiking, photographing, doing something. Friendship can happen around that without anyone scheduling “connection.”

Enough structure to make the group a group. Shared meals and activities matter. Otherwise couples and existing friends can stay comfortably inside their own little bubbles.

Enough freedom to make the trip mine. A free afternoon, a solo prelude, an unscheduled morning. Enough room to develop my own relationship with the place.

People in roughly my season of life. They don’t all need to be exactly my age, but France confirmed that a group with plenty of middle-aged women feels very natural to me.

A destination worth caring about. The activity can’t be so consuming that I could have done it in a conference center in Ohio and had essentially the same experience.

And perhaps most importantly: The trip cannot require transformation.

If something changes, wonderful.

But I don’t want to buy personal growth as part of the package.

I would much rather go somewhere to cook and accidentally come home different.

What Didn’t / I’d Change

I’m less interested now in a trip that is programmed from breakfast through bedtime.

I’m also wary of experiences where the marketing talks more about becoming your best self than about the actual place or thing we are going there to experience.

And I’ve learned that “small group” by itself tells me almost nothing.

Who is traveling?

Why are we together?

How much time will we naturally spend together?

Is there room to wander off alone?

Those questions matter more.

Steal This

A Permission Trip does not have to look like mine.

The system is simply: Identify the trip you keep waiting for someone else to want.

Then ask what would make you comfortable doing it without them.

Maybe that’s a fully escorted group.

Maybe it’s a women-only trip.

Maybe it’s a workshop.

Maybe it’s four solo days attached to something structured.

Maybe you actually love traveling entirely alone.

The permission is not you must travel solo.

The permission is: You are allowed to stop waiting.

Closing Note

My first Permission Trip required a little courage.

I remember sitting in Toulouse, occasionally needing an ounce of bravery, an ounce of independence, an ounce of go before leaving the hotel.

A year later, in Nice, I walked out one morning because I wanted French pajamas.

I got coffee.

Bought the pajamas.

Strolled back through a city that had been foreign three days earlier.

No map.

And got annoyed at tourists for blocking my sidewalk.

Progress is funny.

These trips keep giving me things I didn’t know I was looking for.

But that was never the requirement.

The only requirement was wanting to go.

Take the trip