Throughout the month of May, the traditional beginning of travel season, we're sharing travel stories from our employees along with travel tips and tricks learned along the way. This week, we’re talking about overcoming travel paralysis.

Sheri, our media editor at the Mast Store Home Office in Valle Crucis, shares how she overcame her travel paralysis with an inspiring trip to the west coast:

“Hi, I’m Sheri and I suffer from travel paralysis.”

“Hi, Sheri.”

Maybe I should say that I did suffer. Travel paralysis is the feeling that you don’t have enough information to make good decisions about where to stay, what to do, where to eat, what to see, etc., so you end up not going anywhere. As I learned on a recent trip, you can play it by ear and still have an enjoyable visit.

A co-worker and I had to travel to the west coast for a conference in February. When we left, we knew when we were arriving, when the conference ended, and when our return flight was departing. The two days in between, we had some basic ideas on how to fill, but nothing set in stone and one place we wanted to visit was highly dependent upon weather. For the purposes of this blog entry, I’ll focus on the “weather-related” destination – it was Yosemite National Park.

Our spouses were with us, and none of us had ever been to the Park, so we didn’t know exactly what to expect. With a few checks of the Park Service’s website and a couple of tweets to their Twitter handle, we confirmed that roads were open. My co-worker plotted the route on his GPS, and we were off.

Surprisingly, there were LOTS of people who had the same idea we did – that a warm day in February was a grand day to visit. When we arrived at the Park, they gave us a map to help us locate some of the more iconic sites. From glancing at the map, it seemed like El Capitan was going to be visible as we were leaving the park – not as we were emerging from Bridal Veil Falls. But there it was.

Just a short drive up the road was one of the most recognized mountains in the world, Half Dome. We all thought that you would have to endure a substantial hike to see it. But there it was.

We stopped by the museum to get pins and passports stamped and overheard some employees and guests talking about a rare happening that makes Horse Tail Falls look like a lava flow. On the way out of the Park, we noticed cars overflowing parking lots, parked along the road, and even lanes blocked off to allow parking. There were cameras set up on tripods, long binoculars, and people gathered in small groups waiting expectantly. It dawned on us that we should be looking where they were looking. And there it was. We didn’t get to see the “lava flow,” but we did see the beginnings of it.

We had a very basic plan and ended up seeing so much more than we thought we would. I’m glad that I was able to step out of my comfort zone and learn that you don’t have to have every detail planned for a trip to become a trip of a lifetime. Sometimes, you just have to do it.

For more helpful travel tips, click HERE.