given that my accomodations were already booked, I needed to get up each day and make it to the next town on the schedule. […]

So, the plan has changed. It’s amazing that this can take up so much mental energy

In the last two years I’ve done two long road trips — 3 weeks in Iceland where everything was pre-booked and we had the same dilemma — “must get to next town on the schedule” — and a month on motorcycle in the north of Vietnam where we had literally nothing booked, not even return flights.

I’m not quite as OCD as you but it still took me a few days to get used to the “nothing is booked” approach. We would arrive in a town at 3–4pm and just go from hotel to hotel asking if they had a room free and, if so, how much.

But even with the new flexible approach I still usually had a mental timeline (“today we will drive to Town X and stay there”) and when we talked about changes, I was surprisingly obstinate. I mean, I had only come up with the mental timeline that morning…so who cares if we change it four hours later?!?

People are weird.