If It's Tuesday, This Must Be…
Travel planning in a messy, chaotic world.
Travel is expensive. And in the modern, fractured, post-911, post-COVID era, wandering about can get complicated. It used to be that travel agents took care of all that, but they've been replaced by opinionated strangers on social media and sales pitches on government websites.
You know you don’t want to be led around by the nose on some slick, superficial bus tour by a millennial reciting a carefully programmed list of forgettable sites and jokes. But to strike out on your own, where do you start?
How about with…
A Plan
It makes sense to carefully plan out any complex activity that requires an investment of such resources. Airfares, lodging, ground transportation, and food can range into the thousands for a long weekend in Charleston or Mexico City. Triple everything for a week in Barcelona or Copenhagen, and double down again for a jaunt to Asia.
If you're going to spend your hard-earned cash on travel instead of a reasonably priced used car, you need to know where to start.
And we usually start, even today, with the question…
Why?
Why are you travelling?
Are you looking to connect with your ancestral roots? With long-lost family? Are you looking to dip your toes into the same surf where your great-great-great waited in abject poverty (or religious indignation) for a boat to his, her, and your future?
Are you going on a pilgrimage, religious or otherwise? Rome, Athens, or Constantinople for the ancients? Lourdes, Jerusalem, or Benares for the devout? Appomattox, Normandy, or Vietnam for the heroics of your heritage? Lidice or Auschwitz for the gates of hell?
Are you looking to relive some favorite childhood story? We're thinking Sherwood Forest for Robin Hood, Tennessee for Daniel Boone, Troy and Ithaca for Ulysses, the Alamo for Travis and Crocket, central Switzerland for Heidi.
Is there some theme from your education that still puzzles you? How the entire continent of Europe could come to blows in a world war that sacrificed millions of lives without trading a postage stamp's worth of real estate? How a king could bankrupt an entire country to build a monument like Versailles to his personal power? How another wealthy prince on the other side of the world could transform his grief into a celebration of eternal love and the Taj Mahal?
Are you looking for a simple change from your humdrum everyday life? A place where no one looks, speaks, or thinks like you? Where every word you hear can be a learning experience? Where the memorization of a few simple phrases can help you cross a divide as eloquently as Lincoln at Gettysburg?
Are you looking to win an argument? Are the French really that rude? Did the Austrians invent skiing? Is Indian cricket as boring as it looks? Is it safe to cross a street in Nairobi? Does every Muslim on the face of the earth love us or hate us (or even think about us to begin with)?
Is there some question about life that you've never fully resolved, that you can only approach by planting your own two boots on the ground? How Jesus, godly or not, could summon the strength and courage to walk up the stations of the cross to Calvary and still forgive the rest of us? How the politest people on earth, the Indians, could have fallen into some of the nastiest arguments in history? How innocent wives might have felt at Pearl Harbor when they woke up one Sunday morning to all hell raging overhead?
Are you a foodie? Do you want to finally figure out the difference between Tuscan, Roman, and Sicilian pasta? Burgundy and Bordeaux wines? Mandarin and Cantonese soups? Turkish, Lebanese, Greek, and Israeli skewers? And what's that curry powder all about?
Are you keeping up with the traveling Joneses after years of suffering through their tackiest selfies and videos? Are you finally going to prove what you suspected all along—that they really just holed up in a motel in Newark and sent away for all those images?
Are you bored? Do you just want to get out of the damn kitchen?
We've travelled for all of the above reasons, and all of them—even simple boredom—are valid. But what they all have in common is that they require the next step in any plan, which is (silent groan)…
Research
If you're not fully committed, research might involve tossing a dart at a map, buying a glossy guide book, listing the more familiar sites, and programming them into Google maps for maximum efficiency. We see people do this every day, and if it works for them, that's okay. The Joneses will squirm and silently accuse you of holing up in that motel in Newark. But you'll have gone to all the trouble of nudging your family through Versailles, for example, without understanding how that particular pile of rocks empowered one generation of rulers and utterly broke the spirit of another. And worse yet, you'll never know why it matters—to any of us!
So yes, we're a bit jaded when it comes to guide books and such…
The ancient Murrays and Baedekers make for fun reading, but they say more about 19th century England and Germany than they do about their destinations. If you want to understand Americans, read the Fodor and Rick Steves guides to Outer Transylvania. But before we set foot on a plane these days, we're spending weeks figuring out the subjects that really matter to us and what we need to know about them.
For Example:
Ancestral and family searches have taken us to hillbilly Kentucky, Scotland's Isle of Skye, the Yorkshire of the Bronte sisters, and the elegant 19th century spas of Baden-Baden. But the searches started years earlier at the feet of our grandparents and continued with official record caches and online ancestry services.
Every foodie trip starts with cookbooks, whether the baguettes of Paris, the stews of Corsica, the tagines of Morocco, or the curries of Kerala.
Childhood adventure books never get old. Neither does Shirley Temple.
We try to work on the next language in Rosetta Stone. Numbers and money, hello and goodbye, the meaning of life (just kidding!).
Phrase books are great, but some phrases are more powerful than others. Parlez-vous Anglais? Habla Ingles? Sprechen Sie Englisch? Amazing how many doors open with that one, even when it's obvious. On our last trip to Mumbai, Glinda discovered the phrase "No, but happy New Year" and worked it into every negative shake of her head. The Indian beggars and hawkers, with their love of impeccable manners, didn't know what to do with her.
But mostly, we read books and watch movies—histories of course, but mysteries, romances, spy novels, comedies, biographies, and autobiographies, serious and otherwise, current and ancient. Newspapers and glossy scandal rags from our future host country by the dozen.
And for this we have to thank Ben’s mother. The first time she took him to Paris for a long weekend, she handed him five books and insisted that he immediately inhale them:
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)
Is Paris Burning? (Dominique LaPierre & Larry Collins)
The Fall of the Dynasties (Edmond Taylor)
She wasn’t about to shell out all that cash just to trudge past a meaningless heap of easily forgotten stones.
I am hooked. Great advice for your inaugural article. I wish I had some of these pointers 30 years ago. Better late than never. 👍
Yea! First article!