My wife and I have never went on a cruise, because we always thought that a whirlwind visit to a foreign country, where you change a location every day and have only few hours to explore each town would detract from the experience of travel by not allowing us to see the country through the eyes of someone who lives there, albeit for a short time. During our most recent trip to Spain, we drove from Madrid to Nerja, stopping for a night in Merida along the way. I thought that this would be a very leisurely pace for exploring the rural Andalusia, but the variety of patterns we saw in the landscapes around us was so overwhelming that at some point I gave up trying to mentally capture these in hope to somehow “process” them in the future. At that time, I released that no pace would be too slow to fully experience a country.
Rick Steves, whose travel guides I find very helpful in determining key destinations of a trip, points out that a foreign country is similar to a good novel in the sense that it leaves a better impression when visited the second time around. Certainly, the attitude of assuming that I will return to the place another time helps me personally to avoid (or at least mitigate) regrets of not being able to jam all possible points of interest and experiences in the single trip’s agenda.
In terms of photography, I tried to change the style of my landscape and street photos a bit, by focussing not so much on the composition, but specifically on patterns of light and colour. Using an analogy with painting and drawing, I wanted my images to be more like sketches that capture the impression of the scene, rather than studies of the subjects. My intend was to take care of the composition in post-processing. Hopefully, these visual patterns will become a sort of bookmarks for more detailed memories. Otherwise, the amount of new information that we are exposed during any trip (if we are paying attention to it, which itself cannot be taken for granted) is so tremendous that keeping it all at the same level of memory, with direct access to every tiny detail, is simply impossible.
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