Are You a Specialist or Generalist When It Comes To Travel?

It’s the age old dilemma for travelers – should we return to that place we loved or visit someplace new?

For some though, like travelers in this thread who are explaining why they choose to revisit the same places over and over again, it isn’t a dilemma at all.

We have been going to Italy for the past 30 years, with 27 of those years spent based at my wife’s family home near Lucca … We’ve never run out of old things we enjoy doing again or new things that we enjoy discovering — and, knock on wood — my wife hasn’t gotten tired of me either. Think we have to say that life is good. ~Alpinista

sightseeing is not that interesting for me, or holds a minor interest. Experiencing lifestyle is for me the best part of traveling ~Americana in Parigi

it doesn’t really matter if you’re talking about travel, or any other experience you like to repeat often – the said experience gives you a certain type of pleasure that you find difficult to duplicate in other ways. … In the case of repeated travel to the same destination, that certain place fulfills a longing for a rather irreproducible combination of pleasures that has become attached to this spot on the planet. ~joe

I return to places I have been before to see what I was unable to see before, and I will spend most of my time going slowly through just one museum or one rather small area of a city. I find it invigorating and thought provoking, not tiring. I can do it all day. ~kiera

What becomes clear from the conversation, and contrary to what I might have presumed, is that choosing whether or not to revisit a destination is not necessarily dependent on whether a person prefers to explore or relax. kiera, quoted above, offers a great example of that.

This is a really thoughtful discussion, and if you are the type who tends to visit a new place on each trip it’s worth a read, as it just might change your perspective.

Read the thread in its entirety: Question for those who go back to the same places every year

Personal preference” by Kevin Dooley. CC BY 2.0.

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