Remember when I splurged my innermost travel secrets — well, kind of — by explaining my research and planning for an upcoming trip to New South Wales on the east coast of Australia? Now that I’m back, I want to share a few lessons I was reminded about in regard to traveling spontaneously or with a plan.
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Recap: My Half-Planned Trip
You might remember I usually like to make trips with a minimum of planning. This has several advantages, including the ability to be more flexible, and the fact that I’m much more open to new possibilities and discovering experiences that would have been impossible to plan in the first place.
The concessions I made on this trip were mostly related to the fact that we were traveling during a peak period, from Christmas into the first week of the New Year, which is high summer and school vacation time in Australia and, I’m guessing, the time when the most Australians are on the road, along with a huge influx of overseas visitors too. So I booked some lastminute.com.au hotels – not because I booked literally at the last minute — I did it a couple of weeks in advance — but because they were dirt cheap. We had our airfares to Sydney, too, plus an approximate plan to stay with two sets of friends up in the Hunter Valley region north of Sydney, and the basic information on how to get up there by train.
A Little Planning Never Hurts
On the Ground: Spontaneous Versus Planned Sightseeing
One reason my husband makes a great travel companion is he’s also happy to be spontaneous about our trips. We wanted to spend a few days in Sydney before we headed up to see our friends, and he didn’t start making plans for what he wanted to see in Sydney — his first visit — until we arrived and were crashed out in our hotel room recovering from our midnight horror flight. Then he pulled out a map we’d picked up at the airport and started making suggestions.
We spent a couple of days covering the bits of Sydney he’d always seen on TV back home in Germany — walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and admiring the odd architecture of the Opera House — with afternoons in places we both find interesting, like the Museum of Contemporary Art down near the harbor. We never planned more than a day in advance, and did so by batting around ideas over dinner, and neither of us felt pressured to do any additional “musts”; while everybody else would say, “Take a ferry out to Manly Beach,” my husband decided the beaches are better back on the west coast and he’d rather see some modern art.
When we moved up to the Hunter Valley, two hours north of Sydney, we really had no plans other than landing on the doorsteps of friends. Both sets of friends had lived there less than six months, so they weren’t exactly reliable locals when it came to suggestions for what to see and do, but together we all stumbled through local maps and brochures and found some great days out. Fortunately for us, they had the same ideas as us about combining a bit of relaxation (usually in the form of late breakfasts) and a bit of exploration (with lake cruises, mountain drives and vineyard visits) and we could happily continue operating in spontaneous trip mode.
Open Road Near Allentown, Pennsylvania © Nicholas_T
Spontaneous or Planned? Lessons for Travelers
I actually came home from this trip relaxed and inspired, which must mean I had the right balance of not tearing around to see everything, but visiting enough interesting places that my imagination got ticking. In other words, the perfect trip for me. I don’t want to forget the reasons why this happened, so these lessons are just as much for my own selfish benefit as for anyone else:
- Don’t feel obliged to visit so-called must-see sights. Visit what interests you. Remember, the Eiffel Tower once got voted as the world’s most disappointing tourist spot. Seek out the places which are of personal interest to you.
- Be spontaneous. Wait to see what the weather will be like before finalizing your plan for the day. Wait to see what mood strikes you when you wake up — do you feel like a hike in the mountains or a lazy day in an art gallery with a long picnic lunch in the park? Don’t be afraid to change your plans.
- Plan and book things that could really mess up your vacation. In this case, I had airfares, and hotels booked for busy nights. I’ve arrived in cities before without a hotel booking during peak travel times and spent a couple of hours trudging around to find a spare bed, and I’m too much of a flashpacker to want to do this any more. Another case for booking is for very popular attractions — for example, if we’d wanted to get on top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge with BridgeClimb, we would have needed to book at least a few weeks in advance.
- Forget all notions of what sightseeing is. Two of the places we stayed up in the Hunter Valley definitely qualified as small town stopovers with no obvious sightseeing spots. Fortunately, I love exploring small towns and the fact that one of them was home to the factory which produces my favorite breakfast cereal totally made my day. Learning the habits and quirks of the local inhabitants led to all kinds of fascinating insights.
Planning for the Next Trip
In a few months, I’ve got flights booked for a trip to South Australia, and so now it’s time for me to start learning about my destination and figuring out which bits of the trip I want to plan. That’s an exciting time, and I’ll try to remember my own tips when I’m doing so.
Where are your next trips? How much will you plan, and how much will you leave up to spontaneous decisions? Let us know in the comments!