We’ve all been there. The initial enthusiasm and a vague destination, and then, somehow, somewhere down the line, things get complicated. There’s too much for one day, or you realise you’re going to have to get a bus, a train and a taxi just to get from A to B, or that you need to check the opening hours of the museum you want to visit. This doesn’t happen because you’re not trying. This happens because you’re probably rushing and not paying enough attention to the way in which all the different elements of the trip fit together.
If you start to think of planning as a craft then you have to slow down and pay attention to where the wheels are falling off. So what are the most common problems and how do you fix them? The first and most common is not allowing enough time. This is easy to do. You imagine that the journey from one place to another will be swift and seamless. That you can fit in two or even three activities in a day. The thing is, travelling always takes longer than you expect, and there is always a snag or a hitch or a moment when you just need to sit in a café and regroup.
So my advice is to take a simple journey and write it out in full. Include the time you expect to wait for a bus, plus the journey time, plus getting a taxi at the other end, plus waiting for your bags to arrive on the conveyor belt. This will give you a sense of the time it really takes to get from A to B and will help you avoid over-ambition in your itinerary. The second is not taking into account your energy levels. You look at your itinerary and it all looks very efficient and manageable but when it comes down to it you are just too damned tired.
You can’t fit in three historic sites in one day without a break. It is just too much. So learn to build in down time. A coffee in the morning, followed by a visit to a site, lunch, then perhaps a food tour, then dinner. That has a rhythm to it. That is doable. Simply ticking off a list of ten things you want to do in one day is not.
The third is blindly following an itinerary you’ve found online without amending it to suit your own needs. I think that itineraries can be incredibly useful as a starting point but the likelihood is that the person who wrote it has a different travelling style to you, is probably more interested in art than you are, or whatever. The problem with not going through the itinerary and properly amending it to suit your own particular needs and interests is that you will miss something important. You won’t notice, for example, that your bus out of town on Friday is at 6pm but check out isn’t until midday.
So grab an itinerary and amend it. Properly amend it. Rewrite it in your own words. Change the times to suit you. I guarantee you that in doing this exercise you will pick up on at least three or four things that you hadn’t noticed before. And lastly, if something doesn’t feel right then it probably isn’t. So stop and consider what the problem is. Is it that you’ve left the gap between the train arriving and your plane taking off a bit tight? Or that you’ve got too much crammed into one day? So isolate the problem and then test it. If you’re worried about the connection time between the train and the plane then test what happens if you take a later flight. If you’ve got too much in one day then test what happens if you get rid of one of the activities altogther, or swap the order around.