Sink into Summer – My Journey from Dream to Reality

The sun may be a little late in arriving this year but I have already sunk into Summer.  I absolutely LOVE Summer.  Summer starts for me as soon as the evenings start to get brighter. I have more energy, enthusiasm and motivation in the Summer months, and I don’t hesitate to sink deep down into it, sunshine or no sunshine, just give me the daylight.

I also love Summer because it has such a positive impact on people’s moods and energy.  The anticipation of things that Summer brings: light, heat, barbeques, picnics, days in the park, days at the beach, children on school holidays charged up for months of adventure of fun.  I soak it up (and even store a little bit up for the Winter months!)

For me, Summer also brings holidays.  I take the word holiday very seriously, for me it means going abroad, long days with lots or nothing to do, sleep, fun, food, adventure, different cultures, new people…..bring it on, I love it.

Five years ago I went on my first cruise. Something I had wanted to do for many years and it was fantastic.  I was hooked (line and sinker) to cruising and have cruised again since then.  About four years ago I decided that I would love to do a cruise in Alaska but it was a bit of a pipe dream.  I didn’t share this with anyone and just held it in the back of my mind as a sort of “Bucket List” item.

Then, purely by chance about 3 years ago a mutual friend and I were chatting about places we’ve been to and would like to go to someday. I mentioned Alaska and it turned out we both wanted to go there.  That was the moment when the dream started to become reality.  We decided to go and would save for as long as it took to do it right.  We researched the different itineraries and identified the places we wanted to visit on our cruise.

Two years on, we were both consistently saving but I knew I needed to make a stronger commitment if I was to really make this happen for myself. So we set ourselves a target to go in 2015. We were very psyched about it.

Earlier this year we booked our 7 night cruise in Alaska, ensuring that the itinerary involved the places we wanted to visit.  What happened next blew my mind.  Our flight to join the ship brought us to Vancouver so we decided to stay in Vancouver for a few days.  Our return flight stopped over in Toronto so we decided to stay there for a few days too!  Then my sister pointed out that Niagara Falls are in Toronto (which hadn’t clicked with me) so we booked a further night in Toronto and a day trip to Niagara Falls.  Within a few weeks we had also booked a canoeing trip (a first for me) in the Icy Strait and an afternoon of zip-lining (another first) across forest tree tops surrounded by views of icebergs. The trip kept on growing from a 7 night cruise (the dream) to a 14 day holiday which exceeded not only the dream but also my belief of what was possible.

What I have learned for this experience is:

• Share your dreams, talk about them to others, you never know what it might lead to.
• Take the first step to realising your dream. (For me it was starting to save, there was no specific timeline, just taking the first step to move towards the dream)
• Commit to your dream. Whether it’s, in our case, save the money in 2 years, 3 years or 5 years, it didn’t matter what time period we put on it, just having a point in the future to aim for enabled my commitment.
• Be open to exceeding what you once thought was possible and diving into new experiences.

What really inspired me to write about this experience (other than my excitement about going to Alaska and Canada in a few days…) was an article I recently read on LinkedIn about not sharing your dreams and goals with people.  This may work for some people but not for me as it doesn’t serve me well.  By sharing my dream I connected with someone who had the same dream.  I believe 100% that I would not be going on this amazing holiday adventure next week if I had kept my dream to myself.   Imagine how things might have turned out if Dr. Martin Luther King had only thought “I have a dream” and left it at that.

Image courtesy of www.airplane-pictures.net