Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Considering each of these levels of planning in more detail, you'll be able to lay brush
stroke after brush stroke, a little more each day, until the masterpiece of your journey be-
gins to appear. So let's begin with the practical side of the planning.
The easiest way to get started is to visit your local bookstore to browse through the
various guidebooks for your destination. The first big piece of the puzzle that you need
to assess is where exactly you plan to go. While it may be tempting to try to visit several
cities in your one trip, you'll enjoy many advantages if you instead pick one home base
and take several day trips. The main advantage to this approach is practical in nature: time
is always lost in transit, and you'll want to make the most of the time you have in your
location. Moreover, traveling with luggage can be inconvenient, and you'll want to avoid
juggling your belongings. And finally, you gain flexibility from only having one lodging
arrangement, as you won't have to consider where to stay should your plans change. For
example, my wife and I found that five days was barely enough time to visit Amsterdam,
and we were happy to trade a planned day trip for an extra day “at home.” If you feel an
urgency to visit several cities on this one trip, remember that you're investing a lot of en-
ergy into preparing for it, including learning the language of your target country, so you're
likely to want to return again and again. Although you're preparing for a trip of a lifetime,
the
Travel Every Day
approach will allow you to take several more such trips in the future.
With the idea of a single home base in mind, the next step is to create a big-picture
itinerary. Since day trips usually require an early start and a late return, it's best to sep-
arate your day trips by at least one day in your home base. In addition, you may need a
few days to adjust to the time change upon your arrival, if you've traveled across multiple
time zones, and you'll want to spend your last day in your home base as well to make sure
that your travel home goes smoothly. Finally, you'll find it helpful for planning purposes
if you focus on a different region of your home base each day that you're in town. Guide-
books will typically divide a city into regions for you, and by exploring the various regions
one at a time, you'll save time and energy. This particular lesson was hard earned for me
in Venice, where I once tried to organize a “church” day, with the intention of seeing the
all of the main churches of the city in one day. This seemingly clever idea turned into a
wild-goose chase that took my wife and me all over the city, where we got lost constantly
and failed to visit more than one third of our intended itinerary. I know that people say that
Venice is a great city in which to “get lost,” and this is true to a point, but I can attest that
running into dead end after dead end and losing hours of our trip wasn't actually very fun.
We would have been much better served to focus on a portion of the city, saving other por-
tions for other days.
To give some shape to these concepts, suppose you're traveling out on a Tuesday and
returning on the following Wednesday. Your trip itinerary might look something like:
