By Myscha Theriault / Tribune News Service
It’s all well and good to check out a museum or head back to the hotel to read a book when an afternoon shower encroaches on your itinerary, but when you are stuck inside for a week or more, as my husband and I recently were due to an unexpected shift in local weather, things can get stressful quickly. Sharing a limited, crowded space with no way to step outside for a private cup of coffee or a Facebook Messenger video chat with a friend can cause tension for even the most mellow of couples. Having a few favorite activities in your rainy day repertoire is a good idea for minimizing frustration.
Beverages: Whether the reason is prolific precipitation or a missed transportation connection, when travel stress strikes, I am well known for heading to the local bar, while I drink about a solution. When you are dealing with an extended stretch of bad weather, it’s particularly important to get out of the house for a mental-health break. If the place you go happens to have an endless supply of beer, even better. Rainy stretches are the perfect opportunity for a pub crawl or beverage-exploration expedition to discover who makes the best version of a destination’s signature drink.
Bermuda even has a cocktail aptly named for it. It’s called Dark and Stormy, and when mixed properly, it is guaranteed to rapidly readjust your mood. If alcohol isn’t your thing, crawling the local coffee houses can also be fun. If you are traveling in a country where you don’t speak the language, choosing to hydrate at an establishment with free Wi-Fi is a good idea. You’ll easily be able to download a new book when you finish the one you are reading. If you travel with earbuds like we do, then streaming a movie or a few episodes of your favorite television series in your mother tongue is a great work around when you are in a location without a foreign-language movie theater.
Photos: Sorting through the myriad of photos we snap on any given trip is no small task. Between two smartphones and the DSLR, it isn’t uncommon for us to snap a thousand or more images per week when we are exploring some place new.
Inclement weather days are the perfect time for us to sort through the backlog and weed out the substandard images. I’ll be the first to admit that tagging and labeling for easy access later on isn’t something we’ve gotten efficient at yet, but we do at least try to weed our way through our image garden on a fairly regular basis.
Rainy, stormy days provide the perfect opportunity to peruse prior travel memories, and remind us we are still living the life of full-time adventure we worked so long to achieve. Even when Mother Nature decides to clip our wings and keep us inside for a week or more at a time.
If you’re like me and want to share as many photos with as little effort as possible, you might want to explore one of the collage apps available for those who use their camera phones frequently. The Insta Square Size app for Android phones is a free, no-crop program I installed on my phone recently. It lets me quickly tap multiple photos and choose a layout which best showcases the selected images. Then, I only have to come up with one caption when I share the collage online, as well as only having to sit around and wait for one graphic to load when I am someplace with slow data-speed access.
Updates: Speaking of photo sharing, we all know how frequently folks from home ask for image updates of your adventures, no matter where you are traveling. It can be frustrating sometimes to feel pressured into live posts when you’d rather be enjoying your hard-earned getaway. This is why I typically try to post less while I’m in the field, and save more elaborate social-media updates for a time when I am not out and about. Lousy weather days are a perfect opportunity to try out an extra photo app feature, share a few more anecdotes to explain an image collage and simply touch base with people in general to see what new things might be going on in their lives.
Having been on the road now for a fairly long period of time, my husband and I have noticed that our social-media accounts aren’t the only things that need updating from time to time.
Banks and credit card companies like to know when you are getting ready to change countries again, clothing items start to wear out, and the small corner of your bag set aside for items in need of mending can begin to take over more and more of your luggage space. These things can all be updated on a rainy day, while you stream a favorite news show in your cottage and put on a pot of stew.