2026 Kick Off

I wanted to start the year by setting some goals for myself for the year in regards to travel. Mostly, I wanted to preplan where to go, jot down some ideas regarding how I’ll try to score tickets, and just a general level of parsing out my paid time off.

High Level Planning

This upcoming year is going to start off with a few trips that I am already committed for. They will be the jumping off point and I will try my best to work around them for the remainder of the year.

A part of this exercise is to figure out how best to use my paid time off to ensure that I can go places I want to go to but also be able to contribute in meaningful ways at work. I would make a joke about having a spreadsheet with all my trips and potential trips being tracked, but I actually do that. It is such a weird thing to me that as an adult, I spreadsheet the fun I want to have.

Places to go

Anyway, I have a few places I already want to go to for 2026.

So far, I have tickets for a bunch of places in 2026. These are New Orleans and Nassau, Bahamas and Panama City, Panama. These are all trips with plane tickets purchased. I have got a place to stay booked in Panama, but still need to do so for New Orleans and Nassau. All three trips are fairly short and will only eat a couple days of time off each. The NoLa trip will have me working a day remotely with the coworkers I am going with.

There is a fourth place I have tickets to, but it’s more of a show up and camp out in a spare room type of trip. I have a trip booked to go to Minneapolis and celebrate a friend’s birthday. That involves working a Friday remotely, but is a Thursday night to Sunday evening trip.

While I do not have a flight booked, I am planning on going to Oktoberfest in Munich this year as well. We have booked a place to stay already since the likelihood of finding something decreases the closer you get to Oktoberfest. We have a loose plan to fly in and out Zurich, Switzerland and pile a second destination onto the weeklong trip.

I have a strong want to go to Spain and help celebrate a friend’s birthday by taking part in the running of the bulls in Pamplona. He is blowing out the year and celebrating turning seventy by taking on a bunch of stuff that would be impressive for someone even half his age. That also is earmarked as a week long trip and will have to be fully done with paid time off.

The final trip I have very loosely being considered is a trip with family to take my nieces on their first international trip. We have not given it a lot of planning yet, but an English-speaking country, likely in the U.K., has been the prevailing thought so far. We have a goal of doing so over Thanksgiving to make use of the holiday time and minimize paid time off for what should be a weeklong trip.

If I use all of that time, I should have a few days to use for sick time or weekend trips I am willing to call out sick for at the end of the year. Those days do not transfer from year to year, so a last minute deal sounds ideal. A trip to NYC in the later part of the year is a big want.

Goals for 2026

Trip Goals

For trip goals, I would really like to try some things I have never tried before. This could be new foods that I would usually be hesitant about or doing shit that I kind of find scary. Stuff like doing the running of the bulls in Pamplona or doing some diving near Nassau. I am not a fan of heights, so pressing that fear is always a good option.

I would love to get somewhere with my nieces and hopefully rub some of the wanderlust I seem to have off on them. One may be a bit too young to really enjoy it, but I really hope the older niece can see some stuff she finds wonderous and get that feeling I get when I travel.

I really want to take the train during the day from Zurich to Munich and get to see the Alps. I have always liked looking out the window on trains and watching the scenery go by. Trains in Japan and along the English Coast to Cornwall have been absolutely gorgeous and I hope a train through the Alps can contend as a favorite.

I would also like to get better with my camera. Typically, I take a lot of iPhone pictures, but would like to delve deeper into photography with my camera. I was both happy with and annoyed with the quality of pictures from the Northern Lights this year and would love to get better in general with the pictures I take.

I would like to spend a good 45 days travelling in 2026. This includes roughly fifteen days of paid time off, a couple planned sick days, and a bunch of weekender trips where I spend a day working remotely. Mostly that will be domestic trips to see friends and a Friday working out of a closet or on a couch or where I can space.

Blog Goals

I also made a list of things I would like to do with this site. I am not sure that anyone past a few people I know will ever read, but it has my attention currently and I am enjoying it. So, why not make a bunch of goals for this shit.

First, I would like to keep up with the blog for the year. I would like to average a post a week and keep up with a schedule for putting new content up. I would also like to drop links on Facebook and Instagram for every new post and get those not looking totally garish when doing so.

I would like to get better pictures up on the site. This goes for both Ben Venturing and Dryllama, my picture gallery site. Again, I’d like to focus on the quality of pictures and skill up a bit. I should maybe invest some time in relearning Photoshop or some other expensive as hell Adobe product that seems less like photography and more like digital imaging to me. I probably won’t though.

If at some point I decide to pony up some cash, I may try to do some tweaking to the layout. Maybe try to learn some Search Engine Optimization as well. A large part of me feels really weird about the idea that a bunch of stories of me going places and doing dumb shit could make money.

There is some technical architecture stuff I would like to do with site that hopefully never manifests as being visible on the site. Right now, everything is bucketed into a single folder for posts and I would like to break that out into a better file structure. This is absolutely boring nerd shit though, so if your eyes have yet to glaze over, thanks for reading.