If you’re like most hardcore travelers, you have all sorts of places around the world that you would like to visit. It’s not a matter of having amazing places to visit. There are however limits on your time and money. There are also family considerations and work obligations that keep most of us from going anywhere we want, when we want. Still, there are some destinations which must be made a priority. I call these the Bucket List destinations, though obviously the term belongs to someone else.

Bucket List destinations are the places you’ve got to go before you die. I have a bunch, but for certain personal reasons, my #1 personal Bucket List destination was Giant’s Causeway. Located in Ireland, Giant’s Causeway is centered around a singular geographical phenomenon. You have to see it to really understand, but it looks like something that would have been designed by an artist, but it wasn’t. Nearby, there are villages and hangout spots, quaint and beautiful and just the kind of places I like to spend my time. Before I made it to Giant’s Causeway, and my amazing tour with Allen’s Tours, I had to figure out how to make the trip work. Here’s how I did it.

  • Work and Money. This is the hardest thing about traveling to the places we want to see. To make travel a priority in my life, I had to get into a different line of work. As a freelance writer and blogger, I suddenly had the locational freedom to go and work from where I chose. This is hard for some people, because freelance bloggers don’t usually get benefits like health insurance. But they get to travel, which is quite a benefit in itself. I could have made the trip happen even if I hadn’t started a new kind of work, but it would have had to have been short, and it would have been the only major travel I could have done for quite some time.
  • Prioritization. In order to go out of the country, I had to spend less money and time on other things. Rather than going out every weekend, I had to save up my pennies for a plane ticket. Because I bought the ticket much earlier than I changed careers, this was the way it had to be done. Plane tickets are the major expense in international travel. Prices are going down, but it’s important to simply order early to get the savings. Without cutting out some other expenses, it’s likely that these bucket destinations, just a ticket away, will never be visited.
  • Gumption. I think this may be the biggest factor of all. Many people could travel. They simply don’t. If destinations are important to you in the way Giant’s Causeway was to me, you’ve got to simply make them happen. There are a million little details that have to be worked out in order to go on a trip like this, or to make travel the exception rather than the rule. To pull it off, you’ve got to be clever and motivated. Find out how to do it, then do it.