How to combat post-tour gloomies!

Hang out at the RS Travel Forum! LOL!

Meet up with our fun Coeur d’Alene/Spokane RS Travel Group and share recent fun & humorous travel memories and excitedly listen to others’ plans. Fellow travelers understand the up & down emotions of just returning from a trip!

If my trip is solo traveling, I post a few photos each day on FB during the trip, along with a short commentary. My friends have requested it because they can travel “virtually” with me. (I even had a FB friend comment this morning at church how much she loved the trip!). That really helps me enjoy it over again, too, when I see people over the next month. If my husband comes with me on the trip, though, we don’t post on FB until we’re home to not advertise our home is empty.

I typically travel to Europe in September and begin planning the next trip - mentally beginning in October and actually research & reservations beginning in December. There is that time period when I’ve been back a few weeks where it would be dangerous for me to check cheap flights for November! ; )

Hang out at the RS Travel Forum!

Same! I don't tour but I do start planning my next solo trip and grabbing travel books at the library to read. And I tend to start shopping for travel items, which can be very dangerous. One post in the Packing forum recommending a bag and I'm on the website, ready to add it to my shopping cart.

I'm now planning a capsule wardrobe for my next trip (thank you, Mo R) and am obsessing over what I can sew vs. what I should buy.

Oh gosh, I thought maybe I was the only one!

My post Best of Istanbul and Best of Turkey coping has included:

• continuing (and continuing) to add little entries to my Trip Report (dreading the day it is closed for new entries)
• responding to every forum enquiry about Turkey that I can
• creating a 258 slide (and counting!) digital scrapbook, reliving each day and every event in the process
• sharing some photos (not 258!) with my RS travel group, bless their kind, travel-loving souls!

Trying to look forward:
- booking my 2023 tour!!
- checking out a bunch of library books for my next tour
- prioritizing my next 3 or 4 (or 5) tours
- trying to channel my travel energy into my fall trip to Portugal

And anticipating hearing about the fall tours to Turkey so that I can relive it all again.

So glad someone understands!!

I too have ways to remember my recent trips.

I also try to answer questions on the country I’ve just been to,
I sort through my pictures, clean them up, and start a snapfish scrapbook. Still working on my Sicily book from April.
Re-read my journal
Start planning our next trip

Very few of my friends like to travel so I don’t get to talk too much about them. That’s why I look forward to the zoom meetings.

I too suffer from the same affliction. I spent a month in Spain and Portugal in April 2022 and I only crave more travel. I have a trip planned to Spain and Morocco in November 2022. To help with the gloom, I practice Spanish with Duolingo, listen to or read book of historical fiction on past and present travel locations and watch movies filmed in or near the locations I have traveled or wish to travel to in the future. Recently watched “The Sheltering Sky” and read the book by Paul Bowles. The movie is okay, great scenery- filmed in Morocco, but book is much better. Best author quote that speaks to me for the passion of travel: “ “Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

alcohol and something else RS is intimately familiar with.. get out of your mind for a bit

I find that seeking out restaurants/wine bars that have the wine and cuisine of where I’ve been are fun to revisit what I experienced. And then finding those restaurants/wine bars that have the cuisine and wine of what/where I look forward to experiencing next. I seem to always find like minded people that may also be going through the same European withdrawal symptoms. 😊😊

I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s replies. My trip photos and scrapbook kit have arrived, as has the Lake Hallstatt puzzle, so I’ll have fun activities for the weekend.

Block off the calendar so there are no commitments for 2 days after arriving home. No meetings, calls, emails whatever. Time to ease back in routine and not have an event scheduled.

I’m glad to hear that I’m not alone in this feeling! I’ve been back from my France tour for a little over a month. I posted my trip report, shared some pictures on Instagram, and also made one of those iPhone slideshows set to music of my trip. Next I’d get some of my pictures printed and perhaps make a photo album.

I also like to watch food and travel shows and start to read up on the next places I’d like to visit, both on the forum and elsewhere.

I have been home from Ireland for exactly a month now and have ‘stuff’ from my suitcase still spread out all over my spare bedroom, aka “the travel room”. As soon as I got home, my coping strategy was to plan and book a tour with my family for next May. My current plan is to (eventually) repack the basic travel stuff I always take and put it away until next April. We have started to do some pre and post tour research. Fortunately my daughter loves to plan for travel too, so we will be doing that off and on for the next several months. The anticipation of planning for the next trip helps me return to real life!

We are leaving for our 3rd RS trip, Best of Munich, Salzburg and Vienna tour in a few weeks! Getting more and more excited! Interesting, while I do deal with depression, the gloomies, coming home from traveling, isn’t something I’ve ever felt.

My husband & I were enjoying our lunch together this Saturday afternoon on our front deck, admiring our view - we live in the mountains & have the river below us. I suddenly remembered eating a tasty seafood lunch in California outside, facing the ocean at the Del Hotel. That trip was many years ago. I shared other pleasures from that trip again with my husband. We are reminded often of our travels, getting to relive them.

It’s fun to join in these travel ‘conversations.’ I have thought about making a Shutterfly book of each trip with our photographs as scrapbooking doesn’t interest me & looking at pictures with the computer isn’t that comfortable. Our winters allow more for such activities, so I’ll just have to make it a priority. It’s fun to read about the places we’ve traveled – both fiction & non-fiction & watch movies that are set in our travels. On our refrigerator I have a photograph of husband & me in front of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies & another of us in front of the I Love You Wall – travel reminders all over!

In my writing nook I have a few mementos of our travels on the wall: postcards, a beautiful framed picture of my husband & me under the Eiffel Tower, a small, framed lace souvenir of a gondolier and so on. With these reminders of our travels right by me, I am always happily remembering a trip. We often talk about trips we want to make. I have wanted to go to Yellowstone in the winter and also to see the butterflies migrate for decades – SOON! Also, we have put down a deposit on a RS trip to Greece for next year! Aren’t we all so lucky to get to travel!

@Andi - you make me feel so much better! I've been home ten days and finally got my travel stuff stored away today. Maybe I'm glad I don't have a spare bedroom!

I have been home 3 weeks from an epic, bucket list trip to Africa (gorillas), so I’m in the midst of the gloomies now as my 2 international trips are done for this year. Now, I have the very long and cold dark Alaskan winter ahead of me. So I brought the travel to me! We have an exchange student from Zaragoza, Spain with us for the school year! And yes also to reading the forum and planning the next trip and working on my photobook.

On our refrigerator I have a photograph of husband & me in front of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies & another of us in front of the I Love You Wall – travel reminders all over!

I've also got a photo of me and my husband taken in front of the Wall of Love on display. It was taken by the very thoughtful and kind Virginie Moré (!) We had been together for decades but this was our first post-2015 "legally married" tour. How fortunately were we?