So sorry I haven't posted in so long. The good news is that I got a temp legal job allowing me to make some money and hopefully put some away for future travel! The bad news is that I have much less time to blog! But anyway, here's one I've been thinking about for some time now so hopefully it helps those planning a trip somehow.
Although it's rewarding, planning and researching your own trip can also be tiring and daunting. Once you've decided where to go, a difficult decision in itself, more difficult decisions await. What time of year is best? How many days to stay in each city? Accommodations? Sights? Ways to save money? It can be a serious time investment to do it well, and I personally believe it can really affect how successful a trip is.
I think one of the biggest mistakes I made was in planning how long to stay in each city on my trip. After several combinations and changes of where I wanted to go, I settled on my list of 10 cities. But then all I sort of did was say "ok, this city is a little smaller, I'll only spend 4 nights here" and "ok, this city is a little bigger, I'll spend 5 nights here" - BEFORE I actually really got down to the specifics of what I'd do in each place. Of course, now hindsight is 20/20; I had no idea how much I'd love Copenhagen and Lisbon and all of Italy and that I'd want an extra day or so in each place. I thought I would totally fall in love with Vienna, but I didn't. I liked Brussels, but four nights was probably one too many, etc. All the planning in the world couldn't have made me foresee how much I would like a particular place or how long I would really feel I needed there.
So my advice to anyone reading - and to myself for future trips - is to figure out what you actually want to do in a city before you plan your amount of time. So, how? The first is obviously through guidebooks. Every guidebook is different. Some just give basic information and don't really update it much (like Lonely Planet). Some update all the time but pick an choose what places to highlight (Rick Steves's Books). And the list goes on. My best advice would be: go to the library and take out various books and read them. Make lists of sights that sound good to you and based on guidebook suggestions, try to figure out how many days you would need. Tailor the suggestions to yourself and the kind of traveler you are: for example if you're not an art person, you probably won't spend as many hours in a museum as someone who is an art person. Another biggie is day trips. Figure out if you want to take any from a particular destination (by destination here, I mean a place where you will actually stay in a hotel). If you want to take day trips from a particular city, you'll need more time there of course.
I already wrote about hotels in a previous post. But in planning your itinerary, the location of your hotel can make a big difference. Do you want easy access to transportation and the train station? Do you want to be in walking distance of all of the sights? If you're renting a car, does your hotel have parking and is it easy to get to? Is it in a safe neighborhood? These are things you need to research and determine the answers to even before you start trying to find your hotels. Learn the neighborhoods, decide approximately where in the city you want to be, what amenities you need, and then research hotels.
I'm one of those Type A planner types and I realize not everyone is. But for me, when you only have 4 of 5 days in a world-class city that has tons to do, I think winging it is doing yourself a disservice; in my opinion, at least minor planning is important or you might end up wasting your precious valuable time. What I did was to plan each day but leave free time for wandering and spontaneity. For one thing, this helps efficiency. With a little research and planning, you can be sure you are hitting sights on days they're open and you can sight-see more efficiently because you hit sights that are all in the same geographical area. Day trips are a nice way to break up hectic sightseeing - I planned my daytrips in the middle of my stay in a particular city when I could. Just to break it up a bit. I think overdoing museums in one day is also not a great idea. If the things are fresh in your mind, I think you appreciate it more and if you try to do too much in one day - something I was guilty of especially one day in Vienna when I went to three palaces in one day or in Rome when I went to about 6 churches all in a row - you'll forget it all and it will just mush together.
I think the ultimate point in all my rambling is that to have the trip of YOUR dreams, YOU have to be the one making the decisions. Blindly listening to guidebooks or people on a messageboard or, as I discussed in another post, blindly following a group tour, means you will have a trip someone else has decided would be great. But if it's not what you want, what's the point? So just do a little bit of researching, plan the trip YOU'D love, and I think you're a lot more likely to have an amazing time!
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