Dream Trips — Season 1: Episode 1 — Where Should We Go?

I have a habit of planning trips I may never actually take.

Not just casually thinking, “Oh, that would be a nice place to visit someday.”

No. 😂

I will look at hotels. I’ll compare rooms. I’ll figure out what I’d wear. I’ll look at restaurants and coffee shops and activities and start mentally arranging an itinerary for a vacation that nobody has booked, nobody has paid for, and nobody even asked me to plan.

And eventually I realized… maybe I don’t actually need to stop doing that.

Maybe I just need to give the daydreams somewhere to go.

So, welcome to Dream Trips. ✨

Daydream It Into Existence

The idea is pretty simple.

I’m going to pick a trip I want to take and plan the version I actually want.

Not the cheapest possible version.

Not the “technically we could make this work if we packed sandwiches and stayed 45 minutes outside of town” version.

The dream version.

Because I’ve spent a lot of my life figuring out how to make the bare minimum work. Sometimes, if I’m being completely truthful, I’ve had to figure out how to make less than the bare minimum work.

So that’s not what these Dream Trips are for.

When I plan these, I’m letting myself go all the way.

For once, I’m not designing an experience around how little I can get by with.

I’m designing it around how good I can make it.

These are Dream Trips.

We’re going alllll the way out. 😂

And then?

We see what happens.

Maybe I plan the whole thing and never go.

Maybe people read along and I make $14 from the links. 😂

Maybe the content earns enough money to pay for part of it.

Maybe a hotel or brand eventually sees one of these and wants to be involved.

Maybe I decide I love the trip enough to save for it myself.

Maybe somehow one of these ridiculous little daydreams actually becomes a plane ticket, hotel confirmation and suitcase sitting by my front door.

I genuinely don't know.

That's part of the fun.

I’m going to daydream it, research it, plan it, publish it, price it—and see how close I can get to making it real.

There’s Just One Tiny Problem…

For the first Dream Trip, I had absolutely no idea where I wanted to go. 😂

I knew how I wanted it to feel, though.

I wanted fall.

I wanted mountains.

I wanted cool air and beautiful views and somewhere that made me want to put on a cute jacket, grab a coffee and wander around without being in a hurry.

I wanted a beautiful hotel that was part of the vacation—not just somewhere we stumbled into exhausted at 11 p.m. to sleep.

I wanted good food. Drinks. A ridiculous bathtub would certainly not hurt.

I wanted things to explore without turning the entire trip into an endurance event.

Basically:

peaceful, slow and soft.

I don't want to come home needing a vacation from my vacation. 😂

And once I started thinking about that instead of simply asking Google for the “best fall vacation destinations”…

I kept coming back to somewhere familiar.

Wait… Colorado Springs?

I’ve actually been to Colorado Springs before—but I barely experienced it.

I've been to Garden of the Gods. I did a little hiking. I've seen those ridiculous red rocks in person.

And I remember enough to know that I want more.

I've never stayed in a hotel there.

I've never planned an actual getaway around Colorado Springs.

I've never given myself enough time to explore the area the way I would want to explore it.

So maybe the first Dream Trip doesn't need to be somewhere I've never seen.

Maybe it can be the Colorado Springs trip I wish I'd taken the first time.

Except this time, I'm not rushing through it.

I want the beautiful hotel.

The cool mountain mornings.

The coffee.

The giant bathtub.

The good food and drinks.

The scenic places.

The wandering.

I want to actually spend time at Garden of the Gods instead of treating it like something to check off a list.

And I want enough empty space in the itinerary to stop somewhere just because it looks beautiful.

The more I thought about it, the more it started sounding exactly like the trip I was trying to find.

So…

I Think We’re Going to Colorado Springs. 🍂🏔️

Well.

Fantasy us is going to Colorado Springs. 😂

Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

At this exact moment, I have no hotel reservation.

No itinerary.

No suitcase packed.

No idea what this thing is going to cost.

And absolutely nothing has been bought and paid for.

But that's the whole point.

Right now, it's just a daydream.

And we're going to see how far I can take it.

So Season One officially has a destination:

Colorado Springs, Colorado. 🍂

Which means I have successfully answered exactly one question.

Where are we going?

✓ Colorado Springs.

Unfortunately, that has immediately created approximately 700 more questions.

What the hell are we actually going to do when we get there? 😂

Next Episode → What Is There to Do in Colorado Springs?