Now I have few months to work on my thesis, keeping my mind active with reading, thinking, and planning and enjoying summer vacation while it lasts. Once you've been in the work world, you never take this amount of time off for granted ever again, that's for sure.
Travel also makes you take a few less things for granted-- including within yourself. Very often I found myself paying attention to events as they occurred, making a mental note to return to that in later writing. That makes for a wonderfully heightened awareness, good for thinking. A good trip also makes you too exhausted to write a lot beyond the basic travel journal, which profuse as it gets, never quite captures every detail that fascinated you.
I also found myself distracted by the sheer volume of photographs I took and had to upload daily. This was my first overseas trip with a camera and I was making up for all those lost trips. With good results, thanks to practice. Last summer, anticipating this trip and wanting not to have a ton of bad pictures, I took my camera and began looking at the local areas as a tourist might, hunting down all the visually interesting stuff to photograph, big and small. It was quite enjoyable to try and see the same old places as a tourist would.