How to Plan Your Travel Days

Adventure is a State of Mind

You’ve figured out when you want to travel, but now it’s time to create a plan to actually structure your travel adventure. How do you want to spend your days?

Priorities and Flexibility

Let me be clear here that I’m not suggesting that you should plan out every hour of every day. Absolutely not! First of all, the likelihood of something unexpected coming along to drastically mess up your plans is extremely high. Also, if what you want is a strict schedule for every hour of your trip, you might prefer to join a tour group and let someone else do the work of planning for you.

What I’m recommending instead is that you figure out your priorities and how much time you want to spend doing them. Then estimate the time needed for practicalities, such as traveling to and from your lodging. And finally, add in a generous dose of extra, unscheduled time to allow spontaneous adventures to occur.

Find the Experts

How to do this? If you know someone who has been to the places you want to visit, definitely talk to them about their experience. If you don’t have access to a personal “expert,” there are alternative ways to obtain similar information. As I’ve mentioned many times, the internet is your friend. If you search “how much time to spend in the Louvre,” you will find numerous articles giving you their opinions about that Paris museum and how much time to spend there.

I especially find blogs and articles written by “expats” helpful. An expat is a person who is living outside of their country for an extended period of time. There is a joke about fish not knowing that they are swimming in water, and we are often not aware of some of the cultural differences that we have grown up with and “swim” in on a daily basis. For this reason, someone (an expat) living in a country that is not the same one they were raised in is often better at noticing and describing places or experiences of interest as well as also pointing out cultural differences. And because they are actually living in an area rather than just visiting for a brief period of time, they have had the opportunity and time to explore the area more extensively. Consequently, they often can suggest interesting, off-the-beaten-path things to do and see.

Similarly, someone from the location you plan to visit who has lived abroad will often have unique insights into their homeland. They often are the very best guides when it comes to understanding subtle cultural differences because they have an insider’s knowledge with an outsider’s perspective. When Greg and I recently planned a trip to Germany, we spent time visiting with our neighbors who are from Germany but have lived in the U.S. for many years. They were not only able to tell us about the areas we wanted to visit but were able to point out customs and cultural differences that an American might find especially interesting.

As with any advice, you will need to consider it through the filter of your own experiences and priorities. For example, if you know that museums bore you to tears, any amount of time may be too long to spend in a museum, no matter how highly recommended it is by the experts. Similarly, if you know you are not an adventurous eater, you may want to avoid restaurants that people rave about because of their originality, uniqueness, or experiments in flavor fusion.

Leaving Room for the Unexpected

The older I have gotten, the less I like to be rushed and the more I find I enjoy serendipity and spontaneity. For this reason, I usually make plans for only one or two activities in a given day. If it is two activities, I usually plan for one activity in the morning and one in the afternoon. This leaves plenty of time for overcoming transportation problems or (more enjoyably) finding some new and delicious food experience.

Creating an Itinerary

Because it helps me to stay organized, I usually write out an itinerary. On some days it includes “fixed” experiences. This is because the activity that I and my traveling companions have decided to do is only available on limited days — a good example of this would be visiting a farmers market or flea market since most towns have designated market days — or because we have ordered and reserved tickets for a museum. Many museums and historical sites encourage you to buy your tickets ahead of time, which guarantees that you will be able to visit, but these tickets usually are for a designated day and time.

On other days in my itinerary, there might be several possible activities listed with the plan that we may do some or none of them. Sometimes I will include notes to give some guidance, such as indicating the hours the site is open or days that it is closed. My travel companions and I are likely to make a decision about these possible activities the night before rather than planning any of them ahead of time. This gives us the flexibility to take into account weather conditions or how we are feeling — walking to a fort overlooking a historic city might sound like a fun thing to do while planning from your living room couch but will seem significantly less appealing when your feet and knees are sore from walking around on cobblestones the previous day.

Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.

Michael Palin

Less is More

A word of warning: I can promise you that as you are planning your trip, you will be tempted to try to do everything. Especially if this is your first trip abroad and if you think that this may be the only time that you will take the trip of your dreams. (Although I can also tell you from experience that once you catch the adventure bug, there is a good chance that this may be your first but not your last independent trip. And if you fall in love with an area, it might not even be your last trip to that specific location.)

The fear of missing something amazing pushes us to want to do everything, but trying to do everything means that you may see a lot but you will experience very little. Slowing down and doing less but taking the time to truly enjoy it and explore will pay off in your overall enjoyment of the trip and the memories you take home with you.

By limiting your plans to one or two designated activities a day, you will be forcing yourself to figure out what you and your companions most want to do. You can still take a list of other activities with you as a backup plan or as something to add on if you find yourself with extra time. (That’s how we ended up visiting the Phallological Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland. If you haven’t heard of that museum, take a moment right now to google it. I promise it will make you smile.)

Prioritizing

Prioritizing means that you will actually do the things that you want to do rather than trying to fit in ten things in one day and finding yourself too tired to do the one thing you really wanted to do. Saying “no” to things that aren’t high on your priorities list means you are saying “yes” to the things that are.

Spontaneity

Having fewer things on your daily itinerary also means that you have time for spontaneous adventures. For example, when staying in Domazan, France, my friends and I had no idea that we would or could attend a wine tasting at 10:00 in the morning, but it is truly one of our favorite memories and stories from that trip. (Say the words “wine breakfast” and watch us all start laughing.)

What are your priorities when you travel? What have been your favorite experiences on past adventures? Were they activities that you planned or did they happen spontaneously?