Travel Planning III: To Plan or Not To Plan

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Okay, okay. I’m a planner. Can’t help it. I’m not a minute-by-minute uberplanner, you have to give me that, but I like to know where I’m heading, and I don’t want to find out later that I missed something I would have loved not to miss.

I haven’t always been this way. My travel lust was born when I was 19 and spent almost a year in Europe and North Africa. I listened to others that had been, made a few notes about places to stay, somehow knew to buy a sleeping bag in London instead of at home, got a passport, an International Drivers License, which I didn’t use, and a Youth Hostel membership, which I did. I carried a copy of Frommer’s “Europe on $5 a Day” and budgeted for 3. I spent one thousand dollars in ten months.

When the weather was cold, we (my friend Anne and I) headed south. When we met some nice guys with a van, we rode with them, for three months. When we were denied a one-way ferry ticket to Tunis from Sicily, we hitch-hiked to the other side of the island and caught a ferry to Malta, not knowing what language the Maltese would speak, nor the money they’d use, nor anything else about Malta. When we met some nice guys with an apartment to rent, we stayed on Malta for a month. We hitchhiked across North Africa, Libya to Morocco. We weren’t mugged, raped or murdered. Apparently.

When I came home after that trip, I did have a plan: to travel again, soon and often. That plan fell through.

My friend Anne did travel, though. She and her now-husband Dave went to Asia for two years. When they left, there were no guidebooks. Around that time the first “Shoestring” (to become Lonely Planet) guide came out, but Anne and Dave’s trip preceded that publication, and they headed off for Samoa not having a clue what they’d find there. There was planning, but not a lot of help in doing it.

I did spend a couple of winters in Mexico. We (my boyfriend Dave and I) drove a 60’s Volkswagon van all over Mexico, spending the nights parked for free in quarries (recommended), and banana plantations (not recommended unless you are fond of mosquitoes). We met and travelled with others like us. Our guidebook was “The Peoples Guide to Mexico” by Carl Franz and Lorena Havens – aimed at vagabond hippie-types like ourselves. On the second trip, we stayed on the west coast, moving on when the Federales raided the campground of Mazatlan, ending up on a beach south of Puerta Vallarta for a month with a community of American expats who wintered there regularly. We built gardens of stones.

I got serious after that, headed off on a career path, had a family, joined the rat race. My next trip was to Ireland in 2004, a trip decades in coming.

I wanted to do Ireland the way I’d travelled before, staying when we found places we liked and finding accommodation as we went. The barrier to that was that we, having joined mainstream society, had the dual restraints of time and budget. I bought a couple of guidebooks, planned a Rick-Steves-but-slower kind of independent tour, and off we (my husband John and I) went. And I learned a lot about planning for travel.

Rick-Steves-but-slower was still way, way too fast. And not booking ahead for accommodation ensured that our places, while nice enough, were out of the way. I learned that I like to be in the center of things, close enough to stumble home from the pub to the B&B. I learned that travel is as exhausting as it is exhilarating, and that I was unable to stay up late enough to find the craic (and Irish trad) until I started taking afternoon naps. The main thing I learned, though, was that even two nights in a town gives me a sense of being more than a passer-through, however delusional that sense might be. I learned that the slower you go, the better the trip.

I don’t know how to balance the need to go slow – being open to discovering things the guidebooks miss, meeting people, and just hanging out when the view is good – with the advantages of booking ahead. I think the only way may be analogous, if opposite, to the principle of packing light: to pack light, pack everything you absolutely need, then remove half of it. To travel well, maybe you need to plan for as long as you think the place will interest you, then book double that amount of time. That means, of course, to go to few places rather than many, to limit driving distances, and to hunker down in places that you hope are as nice as they look online.

The only actual/typical on-the-road travelling we’ll be doing on the upcoming trip will be from the time we leave Berlin to the time we arrive at our gites in the Dordogne, a total of twelve days and eight different towns to sleep in. This is the part of the trip I’ve planned the most, and the part I’m most worried about – that we’ll be moving too fast. I guess this part of the trip will be a good test for my double-the-time theory. I sure hope the gites will be the peaceful haven it appears to be; we’ll probably need the rest, and it’s booked for three times as many days the guidebooks suggest. That should be slow enough.





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