Why the best trips do not start with a plan — and how we stopped spending our weekends in front of a screen.
There are two approaches to travel in our family.
The first one is Bohdan’s. It starts with a Google Sheet, with hotel comparisons, must-see lists, calculated budgets, and a schedule where every stop is tied to the clock. Bohdan loves this. He can spend a week preparing a trip that will last three days. And it works for him — our 4,200 km drive to the Transfăgărășan ran almost second by second according to the plan he made a month earlier.
The second approach is mine. It does not start with a plan. It starts with a feeling.
I went back and forth about whether to write this post at all. Because for people who plan everything, “just going somewhere” sounds careless. And for people who always go on impulse, it sounds obvious. But after one Saturday last summer, I realized this is not really about planning or spontaneity. It is about something else. It is about how we use the free time we have.
When a Saturday Starts to Feel “Empty”
You have probably had this moment at least once.
A weekend day. The chores are done. Monday is still far away. But somewhere inside there is that strange, undefined feeling that something is off. You do not want a show. You do not want to scroll Instagram. Even the coffee that usually saves the afternoon does not save it today. You want something — but you cannot name what.
We used to just stay home in moments like that. Put on something in the background, scroll our phones, and the weekend would quietly dissolve into evening. Nothing wrong with it. Just nothing that would stay in memory either.
It is the shortest possible recipe for losing a day: do nothing, and do not notice that you did.
And then one day we tried something else. Instead of looking for something to watch, we started looking for somewhere to drive.
How the Rule Appeared
We did not invent anything complicated. We just opened the map and gave ourselves one rule: the place had to be no more than an hour’s drive from home.
It sounds like a small detail. It is actually the whole point.
Because when time is short — and time is always short — a long trip immediately starts to feel like an obligation. You have to pack. You have to check the weather. You have to think about food, fuel, the drive back. A big trip demands energy before you have even left.
But forty minutes? That is not even a trip. That is just a drive.
And there is something important here. It is psychologically much easier to tell yourself “let’s go” than “well, maybe next time.” Forty minutes does not threaten anything. It does not demand. It just invites.
That is how we ended up in Lockport. A small town I knew almost nothing about — just that people drive there to fish. We had no plan, no reservation, not even any certainty that anything would be open in the evening. We just got in the car, opened the map, and drove.
And that evening gave us more memories than some carefully planned weekends.
A 1938 restaurant that looked like a slice of 1950s America. A milkshake on the patio while the sun set over the Red River. A dam I first mistook for a beautiful bridge — that turned out to be a National Historic Site and the only one of its kind in the world. A walk along the river in complete silence after it had gone fully dark.
Later I learned that the diner we ate at has been there since 1938 — and that its quiet rival across the bridge once produced an NHL coach who won the Stanley Cup. But that is a whole separate story, which I wrote about in our deep dive on Half Moon vs Skinner’s.
All of it — without a single line in a Google Sheet.
If you want to read what that evening actually looked like, with the real details, I wrote our full Lockport evening trip separately. Or for a deeper look at the town itself, see our Lockport place guide. But this post is not about Lockport. This post is about why Lockport ever ended up in our lives at all.
Why Spontaneous Trips Stick Differently
I thought about this for a while — why unplanned trips leave such a clear mark. Here is what I came to.
When you plan a trip, you create expectations. It is unavoidable. You read reviews. You look at photos. You picture, in your head, how it is going to be. And when you finally get there, you subconsciously compare reality with the version you imagined.
“I thought it would be prettier.”
“It looked different in the photos.”
“Okay, but I expected more.”
Even when everything is great, that filter of expectations dulls the experience a little. You are not just living the moment — you are evaluating how well it matches the plan.
When you drive somewhere with no plan, there are no expectations. And something interesting happens. Every discovery becomes a real surprise. You do not know what is around the next corner — and that is exactly why every corner starts to feel like a small adventure.
A restaurant with red booths and a checkered floor — a surprise. A hundred-year-old dam instead of a bridge — a surprise. Silence by the river in the evening — also a surprise. You are not comparing any of it to anything. You are just living it.
And you come home not with “we executed the plan,” but with “we found something.”
Those are different feelings. The first one is pleasant. The second one is real.
It Is Not About Spontaneity. It Is About Permission
You know what I realized after Lockport?
The biggest barrier to trips like that is not time, money, or weather. It is us. More precisely — our habit of setting conditions.
“We will go when the weather is better.”
“We will go when I am not so tired.”
“We will go when I have time to plan it properly.”
“We will go next Saturday.”
And next Saturday comes, and we are home again. Netflix again. Coffee again. The same day as the previous Sunday, as the previous Saturday before that.
I am not saying that is bad. Sometimes a weekend like that is exactly what you need. But when it becomes the only scenario, something inside starts to squeak. Not loudly. Not all at once. Just, one Sunday evening, you wake up to the realization: where did the weekend go?
The forty-minute rule is not about spontaneity. It is about giving yourself permission to go simpler. To stop waiting for the perfect day. To stop waiting for everything to be just right. To just get in the car and go, because you can.
Canada Is Full of Places Like This
And here is another thing that hit me: there are far more of these small discoveries around us than we think.
Lockport was not on Google’s first page. It was not in any “Top 10 Things to Do in Manitoba” list. Most of my friends know it only as “the fishing place.” And if we had not driven there blind, we would have never known what is there.
Canada is a country made for trips like these. Quiet lakes. Small towns. Roads that lead somewhere. And that “somewhere” almost always turns out to be more interesting than you expected.
This is especially true in Manitoba, where between the big well-known places there are hundreds of smaller ones scattered across the map — and they are often the ones that leave the warmest memories. Not Banff. Not Niagara Falls. Just “where did we even go that day” — the kind of trip you find yourself telling friends about later.
It is a particular kind of luxury to live in a country where there is always something worth seeing within an hour. You just have to get in the car.
Our New Rule
After that trip, Bohdan and I agreed: if a Saturday starts to feel “empty,” we do not look for something to watch on Netflix. We open the map and look for a town.
No pressure. No elaborate packing. No waiting for perfect weather.
Just — where can we drive in an hour? What is there? Let’s just go and see.
The worst thing that can happen is that we have a drive and listen to some music. That is also not a bad Saturday.
The best — we find something we will be telling our friends about for weeks. Or writing a blog post about.
Like this one.
Try It
If you are reading this on a weekday and thinking about the weekend ahead — try it.
Next Saturday, when the show is not pulling you in and the coffee is not saving the afternoon, open Google Maps. Drop a pin on home. Look at what is within a forty-minute radius. Pick a place you have heard of but never actually been to. And just go.
Do not plan where you will have lunch. Do not read the reviews. Do not look at photos. Just go.
Your Lockport is probably already out there. You just do not know about it yet.
