When the best travel plan is no plan

livemint.com:

Stuck with a 36-hour layover in Bangkok in December 2016, I made a wild decision: I contacted a Thai friend via Facebook whom I had met decades earlier, when I was studying abroad in my early 20s. Shortly after, Pim arrived at the airport bearing two flared glasses brimming with ice-cold martinis. We hustled onto a flight bound for Phuket, Thailand, and spent the next 24 hours beachside catching up on the past quarter-century.

It was, clearly, the perfect layover. But for me, it was more than that—it also was a throwback to the self-assured bohemian I once was, who would spontaneously meet up with Danish backpackers on an island lake in Sumatra, or cycle through Vietnam with little more than a backpack and a compass. I had lost that girl somewhere over the decades, buried beneath color-coded vacation calendars, pooled mileage points and prepaid excursions, all carefully curated months in advance.

Now, relaxing on a Thai beach with my old friend, I found myself reconnecting with that 20-something adventurer, open to all possibilities, unfazed by the unknown. That was when I made a promise to myself: Once my kids were launched, I’d pack that spontaneous, no-plans version of me on most of my travels. I would pick the destination in advance and book the flights, but other than the first night of a hotel and a rough sketch of what I didn’t want to miss, I would leave much of the day-to-day to the fates.