Research — What to See and Do

Adventure is a State of Mind

Researching the places you want to visit can be overwhelming, so it is important to pay attention to what you’ve identified as your priorities. It is also useful to think about why those places are important to you to help guide your decision-making.

Why?

If visiting Blarney Castle is on your list of priorities for Ireland, is it because you’ve had a life-long desire to kiss the Blarney Stone? Or is it because you want to see a real Irish castle and that’s the only one you’ve ever heard of? If the answer is the latter, you can avoid the crowds, skip the long lines, and possibly avoid an entrance fee by visiting a lesser known castle, such as Castle Roche.

Many popular tourist sites are visited by thousands every year because they are amazing, so it’s okay if you want to see that specific place. They’re usually famous for a reason. For example, there’s no other place in the United States with the same geothermal wonders as you will find in Yellowstone National Park. If that’s what you want to see, it will be worth the hassle of dealing with the crowds to go there.

But sometimes people visit a tourist site or a restaurant because it is all they have heard of from friends. They haven’t done the research that would open their eyes to similar locations that might give them the experiences they want without the crowds.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

You Do You

Similarly, don’t let peer pressure push you into going someplace or doing something just because it’s what others expect you to do. (See When Less is More.)

After a trip to Iceland, several people asked me whether I had visited The Blue Lagoon. No, I didn’t. I’d done my research ahead of time and wasn’t very interested in hanging out with a crowd of tourists and rubbing mud on my face. My traveling companions and I did, however, visit Gamla Laugin, known as “The Secret Lagoon.” It’s the oldest swimming pool in Iceland. Swimming in the geothermal water, in a pool with a sand bottom, on a chilly October day with fewer than twenty other people, many of whom were locals, is one of my favorite memories from that trip.

Be Open to Advice from Locals

I have to admit here that although I’d done enough research to know that I didn’t want to go to the Blue Lagoon (not knocking it, it’s just not my sort of scene), I didn’t really have a good idea of where we could go instead. My travel companions and I had discussed how we would like to visit the local pool in a smaller community, but we hadn’t identified where that would be by the time we arrived in Iceland. We did, however, ask questions of the locals we met. When the host of where we were staying several days into our trip described Gamla Laugin, we knew that was where we wanted to visit.

Think in Possibilities

My suggestion is to research the areas you plan to visit by searching online and by reading guidebooks and create a list of possibilities. Some of the sites on that list may be bucket list items, and by all means, make an effort to see those places.

Other places may be possibilities that you come across for the first time while doing your research. Some of those places will sound interesting enough to you that it’s worth making plans to visit, but others may only sound mildly interesting. Be open, however, to what you learn once you are actually on your adventure. If the locals keep mentioning the same place or give you additional information that makes it even more appealing, you’ll be prepared to add that place or activity to your itinerary. Some of those spontaneous decisions may end up being the favorite parts of your trip.

If you have a list of places you want to visit, do you know why each of those places is on your list? If you don’t have a reason for going there, are you open to other possibilities?