Exploring My Routes
How I decide where to go next
My travels really start the second I decide I MUST go somewhere. For me, planning itself is part of the trip; I derive tremendous pleasure from the planning and subsequent anticipation of my travels. I acknowledge there are many approaches to planning travel. The tourist enjoying cruise ships, package tours, or all-inclusive resorts may not wish to spend hours perusing maps, flight timetables, and guidebooks. Likewise, a hiker could spend a backcountry camping trip with a plan to arrive and just take in the surroundings.
But that’s not me. I comb through Google Flights, adjusting dates and locations, like a mad scientist turning knobs and pulling levers to help his creature come to life. A wonderful destination to me today is any corner of the planet I haven’t touched. I find a small midwestern town as fascinating as a tropical island.
How is the weather? North Dakota in January? It will have to wait. How big is the area? I cannot cover the entire state of Florida on a four-day weekend. How are Vancouver flights so reasonably priced? Vancouver it is!
Destination in sight, I probe deeper into the place, seeding the days of my adventure with museums, historical sites, neighborhood walks, parks, gardens, and wilderness areas. I will dip into my trip a little every day, whenever I need a break from the mundane. Finishing lunch at my computer, I will sift through the Lonely Planet guide or look at the NomadMania lists to come up with a rough schedule. I’ll then map it all out on Google Maps so I don’t waste a precious second backtracking.
I’m not much of a foodie, so I skip the renowned restaurants in favor of good, cheap food from a restaurant in a local immigrant neighborhood. I’ve had Vietnamese food in Boise, Idaho and Ethiopian food in Omaha, Nebraska.
I arrive at my destination with a daily program. I have never accomplished it during any trip I’ve taken. Instead, I stick around a little longer in some places, and spend less time at places where I thought I’d linger. Planning doesn’t mean sticking to the plan. To me, it means greater freedom and flexibility in my exploration because I spend less time on transportation or discovering the park service has closed the trail I’ve been dying to walk. Real spontaneity better rewards trips with protracted stretches in a place.
In the end, the destination I chose, though, wasn’t where I ended up. I planned to go to one destination in my mind, but where I return from is the place I saw. Henry Miller wrote, “one’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” The question I should ask is not “how do I decide where to go?” Instead, back home where the journey started, I ask myself, “how do I decide where I went?”