Life is all out of whack right now. Between the shelter-in-place orders, travel bans, and everything else going on, we’re not sure how the world is still moving. Not being able to travel has really hit us hard. We’ve cancelled our trip to Gulf Shores for Hangout Fest, cancelled a trip to Cabo for a friend’s wedding, put our move on hold and so much more! That being said, we fully understand that COVID-19 is real and there are much worse things we could be dealing with.Nonetheless, not being able to actually travel has us in serious travel planner mode as we try to find ways to relive some of our favorite travel memories!
Capturing Travel Memories & Planning Travel When You Can’t Travel
Catch up on your favorite travel movies or travel shows
Travel movies and travel shows are a dime a dozen and if you’ve watched one, there’s a good chance you’re being recommended a million more. Here’s a few travel movies and travel shows from Netflix to get you in the travel spirit:
Travel Movies
The Way
The Bucket List
Last Holiday
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Into the Wild
Mama Mia
Travel shows on Netflix
(If you don’t have a Netflix account, you can use our Netflix coupon code and sign up for an account or just do what everyone else always does and borrow someone else’s account, ha!)
Ugly Delicious
Stay Here
Somebody Feed Phil
The Chef Show
Street Food
Read a travel book
Reading a travel book may not be the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about jetting off to a far away destination, but since the latter is not an option, give reading a travel book a try! Sometimes, the best travel books are the ones you had no idea even involved travel!
Eat Pray Love
The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca
The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
Eat, Pray, #FML
A Moveable Feast
Unhoneymooners — travel to Hawaii
Red White and Royal Blue — set in USA and London
One Day in December — set in London
Crazy Rich Asians series — set in Asia/USA
The Nightingale — set in France/Europe
The Simple Wild — set in Alaska
The Little Paris Bookshop
Paris for One and Other Stories by Jojo Moyes
A Gentleman in Moscow — Russia
The Light Between Oceans — Australia
Where’d You Go, Bernadette — Antartica
Paper Towns — road trip
13 Little Blue Envelopes
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Lets Get Lost
Mosquitoland
P.S. Thank you to Kayla from Kayla blogs for helping me with the list of books. If you don’t follow her, Kayla shares tons of book recs and was exactly the person I had in mind to help me pull together this list!
Become a travel planner and plan your next trip
With all of the downtime you have while you aren’t traveling, you can become quite the travel planner. If you’re hoping to find the best travel deals and to figure out how to plan the perfect trip, you can read our post on how we traveled all 12 months of the year in 2019. It’s filled with great tips and tricks and of course, tons of travel inspiration!
Consider virtual travel
Okay, hear us out on this one. With friends all over the world, why not leverage the fact that they are literally just a FaceTime or video call away? They don’t have to be in an exotic location or have picture-perfect scenery.
Give your friends a call, ask them what’s going on in their slice of the world, have them show you what it looks like out their window. Relish in everything that is virtual travel. It may not be as fabulous as traveling, but it beats sitting at home staring at the wall.
You can also check out this virtual travel magazine from The Smithsonian for some of the best virtual travel destinations.
Display your favorite travel photos or travel decorations
Our house is already a shrine to our travel memories but over the last six months, we’ve been trying to be more mindful with our home decor. Instead of having a huge/random gallery wall on our stairs, we chose some of our favorite travel photos and displayed them in a more organized (and way cuter) way.
We found the thin black frames at Walmart for so, super cheap, paired them with a bundle of cheap photo mats from Amazon Warehouse (if you haven’t used Amazon Warehouse or checked out Amazon Outlet, you HAVE to check both out, so many great deals!) and printed our photos at Costco. We’re still figuring out how to style the actual table, but we’re already loving having our Uchi Cookbook (that Tyson Cole signed for me a few years back at a food event eek!) and The Definitive Guide to Being a Texan from Texas Humor on the table! Decorating doesn’t have to be expensive, y’all!
We have both always had a major thing for maps, we’ve just never been able to find the ONE we couldn’t live without. Finding the perfect city map prints was not an easy task for us but when we found Mapiful, we knew it was the perfect fit.
There are a select few travel destinations that we hold so incredibly dear to our hearts and two of those destinations are the city map prints we chose to start with – Gulf Shores and New York. Mapiful has such an easy platform to use, has so many options for customization AND no two maps are the same… It would be hard to find a map print that didn’t fit someone’s style. These stunning map prints would also make the perfect Mother’s Day gift! Right now, you can get 50% off on your second map! The more the merrier!
Whether you’re trying to relive some of your favorite travel memories, planning travel or just reminiscing on past travels, hopefully these ideas have sparked something inside you to help get you through the rest of this travel-less-pandemic!
