Planning Your Itinerary - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats.
Travel Tips - Planning Your Itinerary
Planning my itinerary for travel, I tend to keep it wide open. I don’t plan too heavily. So I plan actually in two stages. First, I plan before I go and I keep it pretty open. I plan my arrival date in my new location and my departure date. And I plan, if I’m going to be moving around in a country, I plan about how many days I will spend in each location so that I don’t fall short in a location that I really wanted to get to. I may have a couple of highlights that I want to see, but that’s about it. That’s about as detailed as I get, before I leave. When I get there, I start planning in more detail and I plan with locals. I go out and I meet locals intentionally to find out what they think is great about their city. I meet them typically at a coffee shop, and preferably an independent coffee shop where the locals go. And if I walk in and I see four of five laptops open, I know I’ve found where the freelancers hang out and they will always take a break and talk to me. I also go to a local pub and just engage the bartender and say, OK, so where do I have to go? And that bartender will usually engage other people and then they’re all planning my itinerary. So, when I plan my itinerary, I do a little bit beforehand, but a lot on the ground when I’m there.
