Some Advice on Chillin' Out on Travel?
February 4, 2015 7:23 AM Subscribe
Please provide some advice, tips, tricks, etc to chill the F out when planning vacations or trips, especially pre-picking restaurants and bars, to pick the PERFECT place. Suggestions to handle on short trips (weekend to a week) are more suggested than long/living vacations.
How do you balance your planning/type-A/I'm only here once must be perfection feeling! with not stressing too much about it and enjoying the experience?
Before I go somewhere new I spend at least 1-2 hours/days (depending on length of trip) on Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc. filling out spreadsheets to decide where we should I'm going to go. Things turn out fine usually, and I actually enjoy the planning to a degree. But then it goes overboard and I get stressed, or I have buyers remorse, etc.
I'm usually a 'experience' traveler. Usually walk around random neighborhoods, stop in for a drink then and eat local foods. I try my best to avoid touristy, overpriced spots. When travelling around South America on a backpacker trip, I just went to places that looked promising, but in the Western world, this seems to be harder (or there is just too much information)
Before I go somewhere new I spend at least 1-2 hours/days (depending on length of trip) on Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc. filling out spreadsheets to decide where we should I'm going to go. Things turn out fine usually, and I actually enjoy the planning to a degree. But then it goes overboard and I get stressed, or I have buyers remorse, etc.
I'm usually a 'experience' traveler. Usually walk around random neighborhoods, stop in for a drink then and eat local foods. I try my best to avoid touristy, overpriced spots. When travelling around South America on a backpacker trip, I just went to places that looked promising, but in the Western world, this seems to be harder (or there is just too much information)
Accept that you may pass this way only once, and that you won't be able to see and do everything. You just won't. The other thing to realize is, if you like it enough and want to explore more, you can always go back.
I would suggest that you leave some things open. Don't plan 100% of the trip. So get a hotel, pick ONE restaurant to try, and then wing the rest of it. You won't die if the Michelin starred restaurant you picked isn't all that great, if you had a transcendent dirty water hot dog for lunch.
Also, pull the plug on stuff that's not working out. If you're bored to tears at the Louvre, just say, "fine, this isn't all I hoped. Let's see the Mona Lisa and then walk around the neighborhood instead." (There are some real DOGS at the Louvre.)
Schedule naps and rest periods. It's okay to see a movie when you're on vacation. Not every moment of every day has to be crammed with an experience. One of the best memories I have is of paying to check into a hotel room at 6:00 AM upon our arrival in London. The fabulous shower and sleep we had before heading out to the Tower of London at around Noon set us up for a great day. If I had scheduled things to keep us occupied until 2:00 PM check in, we would have been stinky, travel worn zombies with jet lag for two days.
You all ready know that just rolling with stuff yields great experiences. Trust that it's true.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 7:51 AM on February 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
I would suggest that you leave some things open. Don't plan 100% of the trip. So get a hotel, pick ONE restaurant to try, and then wing the rest of it. You won't die if the Michelin starred restaurant you picked isn't all that great, if you had a transcendent dirty water hot dog for lunch.
Also, pull the plug on stuff that's not working out. If you're bored to tears at the Louvre, just say, "fine, this isn't all I hoped. Let's see the Mona Lisa and then walk around the neighborhood instead." (There are some real DOGS at the Louvre.)
Schedule naps and rest periods. It's okay to see a movie when you're on vacation. Not every moment of every day has to be crammed with an experience. One of the best memories I have is of paying to check into a hotel room at 6:00 AM upon our arrival in London. The fabulous shower and sleep we had before heading out to the Tower of London at around Noon set us up for a great day. If I had scheduled things to keep us occupied until 2:00 PM check in, we would have been stinky, travel worn zombies with jet lag for two days.
You all ready know that just rolling with stuff yields great experiences. Trust that it's true.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 7:51 AM on February 4, 2015 [4 favorites]
It's okay to be a planner! I'm totally just like you (I am going to Denmark in April and I already have spreadsheets out the wazoo) but I think it's a feature, not a bug. I love finding great affordable hotels and eating where the locals eat and confidently knowing which tourist sites aren't worth seeing, etc., and every time we go anywhere my husband is amazed at my travel planning skillz. The key is to ditch this assumption: I'm only here once must be perfection. If you really love a place, and you feel like you didn't see it all, you can go back.
It is literally impossible to see all of a place in the time allotted for your average vacation. Even in my own city, there are great restaurants I haven't managed to get around to yet, and I've lived here ten years. But you can experience enough of a place to capture the essence of it, to see awesome things and eat great food and to make a mental list of what you want to do maybe a little differently next time.
One thing I've really tried to get better about is focus: only plan on seeing one part of a place (i.e., the west coast of the Scottish Highlands, not Edinburgh and Glasgow and Aberdeen and the Isle of Skye all in one trip). On our next trip we are staying put in one city the entire time, and it is helping a lot with my tendency toward needing to pre-book everything, I think because I feel confident we are going to have plenty of time to really experience the place.
I also think it helps to download a few different apps (TripAdvisor's city guide, if there is one, and Triposo) and to review a couple of travel guides (my favorites are Lonely Planet and, if you're going to Europe, Rick Steves). A few days spent reviewing all the info from these sources shows a pretty obvious consensus about what the true can't-miss sights are, and help me to feel reasonably sure I'm not missing out on anything huge or making a bad restaurant or hotel choice, etc.
And it's good to keep in mind that a trip is made more memorable by the misses sometimes. We recently got stuck in a village in Newfoundland where the only restaurant open was a terrible Chinese-Canadian hole in the wall. Sure, it would have seemed better at the time to eat a nice meal, but the laughter we shared over my husband's lemon jelly coated fried chicken is not something either of us are going to forget. Nor the weird hotel room in southern Tunisia with three beds but no heat or towels. Memories of that kind of stuff are just as powerful and precious to me - and sometimes moreso - than the aspects of the trip that went perfectly as planned.
posted by something something at 7:51 AM on February 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
It is literally impossible to see all of a place in the time allotted for your average vacation. Even in my own city, there are great restaurants I haven't managed to get around to yet, and I've lived here ten years. But you can experience enough of a place to capture the essence of it, to see awesome things and eat great food and to make a mental list of what you want to do maybe a little differently next time.
One thing I've really tried to get better about is focus: only plan on seeing one part of a place (i.e., the west coast of the Scottish Highlands, not Edinburgh and Glasgow and Aberdeen and the Isle of Skye all in one trip). On our next trip we are staying put in one city the entire time, and it is helping a lot with my tendency toward needing to pre-book everything, I think because I feel confident we are going to have plenty of time to really experience the place.
I also think it helps to download a few different apps (TripAdvisor's city guide, if there is one, and Triposo) and to review a couple of travel guides (my favorites are Lonely Planet and, if you're going to Europe, Rick Steves). A few days spent reviewing all the info from these sources shows a pretty obvious consensus about what the true can't-miss sights are, and help me to feel reasonably sure I'm not missing out on anything huge or making a bad restaurant or hotel choice, etc.
And it's good to keep in mind that a trip is made more memorable by the misses sometimes. We recently got stuck in a village in Newfoundland where the only restaurant open was a terrible Chinese-Canadian hole in the wall. Sure, it would have seemed better at the time to eat a nice meal, but the laughter we shared over my husband's lemon jelly coated fried chicken is not something either of us are going to forget. Nor the weird hotel room in southern Tunisia with three beds but no heat or towels. Memories of that kind of stuff are just as powerful and precious to me - and sometimes moreso - than the aspects of the trip that went perfectly as planned.
posted by something something at 7:51 AM on February 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
I have this tendency too, but my husband is the opposite. He wants to just let it all flow. Our compromise approach might work for you.
I spend a lot of time researching things to do and places to eat. Then I throw it all into a folder in evernote -- usually just one folder for the whole trip, but sometimes organized by neighborhood, depending on how long the trip is. Then when we are thinking about what to do, we pick one big thing a day, and I can usually remember restaurants that are near it, or other smaller things that are near it -- and I can quickly look those up in Evernote. We usually have a rough itinerary worked out -- for example, we might want to go someplace that's a bit of a drive on a day when we're planning a simple dinner rather than on a day when we're planning a very expensive dinner at a fancy restaurant. But we don't obsess over sticking to it.
Sure, we might miss the greatest ever SPECIFIC LOCAL FOOD THING, but that's ok, because we will have a nice time, see interesting things, eat at a good place and avoid sniping at each other all day.
The other thing we do is when we leave a place, especially a restaurant, we talking in the car or the walk back to the hotel about our favorite thing about it -- sometimes it's the food, sometimes it's "that weird blue painting of a fish near the entrance." That helps us focus on the fun we had, rather than the fun we missed, and it gives me a hook to think about when I start feeling that panicked OMG I MISSED SOMETHING feeling -- I can say to myself, "that's ok, because I saw the weird blue painting of a fish, and that was really cool."
posted by OrangeDisk at 7:53 AM on February 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
I spend a lot of time researching things to do and places to eat. Then I throw it all into a folder in evernote -- usually just one folder for the whole trip, but sometimes organized by neighborhood, depending on how long the trip is. Then when we are thinking about what to do, we pick one big thing a day, and I can usually remember restaurants that are near it, or other smaller things that are near it -- and I can quickly look those up in Evernote. We usually have a rough itinerary worked out -- for example, we might want to go someplace that's a bit of a drive on a day when we're planning a simple dinner rather than on a day when we're planning a very expensive dinner at a fancy restaurant. But we don't obsess over sticking to it.
Sure, we might miss the greatest ever SPECIFIC LOCAL FOOD THING, but that's ok, because we will have a nice time, see interesting things, eat at a good place and avoid sniping at each other all day.
The other thing we do is when we leave a place, especially a restaurant, we talking in the car or the walk back to the hotel about our favorite thing about it -- sometimes it's the food, sometimes it's "that weird blue painting of a fish near the entrance." That helps us focus on the fun we had, rather than the fun we missed, and it gives me a hook to think about when I start feeling that panicked OMG I MISSED SOMETHING feeling -- I can say to myself, "that's ok, because I saw the weird blue painting of a fish, and that was really cool."
posted by OrangeDisk at 7:53 AM on February 4, 2015 [5 favorites]
When Mr. Koko and I are planning a trip, we also spend a lot of time on TripAdvisor picking restaurants and printing menus, and printing/bookmarking info on sights and things to do. We bring all the info with us so that when we're there, we're not spending a lot of time trying to figure out what to do and where to eat instead of relaxing and doing fun stuff. We don't plan a strict schedule, but each morning over breakfast we discuss which of those things would be good to do that day, and then based on that area of town we might find something else to do that we hadn't noticed when planning. That's how we ended up seeing "Evil Dead, The Musical" in Toronto when we were there, and we didn't even know it was a thing.
Treat your plan as a rough outline, a way to vaguely plan each day depending on how you feel that day/the weather/funds etc. Choose a few "must sees" but keep everything else loose.
posted by Koko at 8:03 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Treat your plan as a rough outline, a way to vaguely plan each day depending on how you feel that day/the weather/funds etc. Choose a few "must sees" but keep everything else loose.
posted by Koko at 8:03 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Oh man, I am so the overplanner you describe. A few things that have helped me:
1. This might not be true for you, but for me this feeling was weirdly tied up in social anxiety and fearing other people's disapproval. It wasn't wanting to have eaten at the best ramen place in Tokyo, it was a fear of getting home, telling someone I had been to Tokyo, and having them say to me "Oh, did you go to place X? You didn't? YOU ARE AN IDIOT AND YOU SUCK." A combination of feeling more confident and comfortable with myself in general, going on many trips where that imagined scenario didn't happen after, and generally being mindful of that fear and how absurd it was, helped.
2. What I now do when I'm traveling is to plot all the places I'm interested in in a map on my smart phone, if at all possible. (This is a little more complicated internationally, but it is still totally doable. You can also use dead-tree maps for this.) That makes it much easier to be wandering in a neighborhood, feel hungry, and pull out my phone and see, for instance, that there's a bakery and a hamburger place that both looked good nearby and to decide what I'm in the mood for. Or to have an hour to kill and see that there's a bookstore and a gallery that I wanted to go to not too far away. For me it hits the right balance of planning but not being wedded to an hour-by-hour itinerary each day.
posted by LeeLanded at 8:14 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
1. This might not be true for you, but for me this feeling was weirdly tied up in social anxiety and fearing other people's disapproval. It wasn't wanting to have eaten at the best ramen place in Tokyo, it was a fear of getting home, telling someone I had been to Tokyo, and having them say to me "Oh, did you go to place X? You didn't? YOU ARE AN IDIOT AND YOU SUCK." A combination of feeling more confident and comfortable with myself in general, going on many trips where that imagined scenario didn't happen after, and generally being mindful of that fear and how absurd it was, helped.
2. What I now do when I'm traveling is to plot all the places I'm interested in in a map on my smart phone, if at all possible. (This is a little more complicated internationally, but it is still totally doable. You can also use dead-tree maps for this.) That makes it much easier to be wandering in a neighborhood, feel hungry, and pull out my phone and see, for instance, that there's a bakery and a hamburger place that both looked good nearby and to decide what I'm in the mood for. Or to have an hour to kill and see that there's a bookstore and a gallery that I wanted to go to not too far away. For me it hits the right balance of planning but not being wedded to an hour-by-hour itinerary each day.
posted by LeeLanded at 8:14 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
I let my partner do the planning. If he over-plans, I drag my heels. If he under-plans, more time for hot wild sex.
This results in fabulous vacations, and I don't have to stress about it. :-)
posted by Goofyy at 8:14 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
This results in fabulous vacations, and I don't have to stress about it. :-)
posted by Goofyy at 8:14 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Maybe you can re-couch the planning as "options"?
You know - instead of making a list of "restaurants I MUST visit", make it more like, "restaurants I should keep an eye out for if I am in X neighborhood".
I do the same kind of advance-planning thing, but I funnel it more into doing things that way - I still have the "oh my gosh I need to know what to do in advance I must RESEARCH THIS" gene satisfied, but without the feeling that I actually have to DO it. I can tell you that of all the restaurants and museums and what-not I look into when I'm traveling, I maybe do two-thirds of the museums and only a third of the restaurants - and my attitude is usually "oh well, I just didn't get to X neighborhood after all, but I went here instead and discovered that cool place that that was also good."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:20 AM on February 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
You know - instead of making a list of "restaurants I MUST visit", make it more like, "restaurants I should keep an eye out for if I am in X neighborhood".
I do the same kind of advance-planning thing, but I funnel it more into doing things that way - I still have the "oh my gosh I need to know what to do in advance I must RESEARCH THIS" gene satisfied, but without the feeling that I actually have to DO it. I can tell you that of all the restaurants and museums and what-not I look into when I'm traveling, I maybe do two-thirds of the museums and only a third of the restaurants - and my attitude is usually "oh well, I just didn't get to X neighborhood after all, but I went here instead and discovered that cool place that that was also good."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:20 AM on February 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
One thing per day.
Plan, by all means. But plan ONE thing to do on each of the days you're somewhere. Plan the living shit out of that one thing, but only that thing. Choose to let the rest arise as a function of the "backbone" of your trip.
"Day 1: Paris Catacombs. Day 2: Marmottan museum. Day 3: Louvre." The rest of the time, Paris is your oyster, and the adventures you have are what springs up in your path.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 9:30 AM on February 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
Plan, by all means. But plan ONE thing to do on each of the days you're somewhere. Plan the living shit out of that one thing, but only that thing. Choose to let the rest arise as a function of the "backbone" of your trip.
"Day 1: Paris Catacombs. Day 2: Marmottan museum. Day 3: Louvre." The rest of the time, Paris is your oyster, and the adventures you have are what springs up in your path.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 9:30 AM on February 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
I do this too, at least to a degree...though for me it is less about being a perfectionist and more about being excited about my trip I think (when I'm looking forward to something like a trip I like to research and plan as much as I can because I'm so pumped I just can't stop thinking about it).
I think my advice would be to create a list of your FAVORITE travel experiences. How many of those were because you planned them to minute and how many were by chance? I think that your favorite moments were not necessarily things you could have possibly planned. At least they are for me. Then make a list of all the times you were utterly exhausted during a trip. Look back and think why? Were those days you tried to cram it all in? Times you went site-seeing to places you thought you SHOULD have gone instead of where you WANTED to go? Sounds like you were able to go with the flow on your South America trip. What about that is different than your US trips do you think?
Another thing might be to plan a couple of different types of vacations at once - one to pack a lot, in another to relax on the beach later that year. Best of both worlds if you can swing it, though that might not be feasible of course...
posted by Shadow Boxer at 10:18 AM on February 4, 2015
I think my advice would be to create a list of your FAVORITE travel experiences. How many of those were because you planned them to minute and how many were by chance? I think that your favorite moments were not necessarily things you could have possibly planned. At least they are for me. Then make a list of all the times you were utterly exhausted during a trip. Look back and think why? Were those days you tried to cram it all in? Times you went site-seeing to places you thought you SHOULD have gone instead of where you WANTED to go? Sounds like you were able to go with the flow on your South America trip. What about that is different than your US trips do you think?
Another thing might be to plan a couple of different types of vacations at once - one to pack a lot, in another to relax on the beach later that year. Best of both worlds if you can swing it, though that might not be feasible of course...
posted by Shadow Boxer at 10:18 AM on February 4, 2015
I'm also a total planner, but here's what I tell myself: It's either so awesome that I'll come back sometime (so no worries) or it's not that super-duper-awesome and I won't have missed out on all that much.
Also, vacations are about experiences. So while I do have an itinerary pretty well in advance, it defeats the purpose if I don't leave space in there for spontaneity. I usually plan 4-6 hours of activities a day (which means one or maybe two things), have a list of restaurants and backup options if we have extra time, and go from there.
Lastly, there could be "the best ramen place in the world" but if they like salty and you like spicy, you're still not going to enjoy it. When we recently went to Beijing (I used to live there, my husband's first trip), we skipped Peking Duck, because he's vegetarian. When we were in San Francisco for a weekend, we decided NOT to go to Mama's, because the line was about 4 hours long. For brunch. (You can't make a reservation ahead of time.) My point is there are perfectly valid reasons to not go to the most popular spots, especially if you're not going to get the same experience as those who went before they became popular.
posted by ethidda at 10:31 AM on February 4, 2015
Also, vacations are about experiences. So while I do have an itinerary pretty well in advance, it defeats the purpose if I don't leave space in there for spontaneity. I usually plan 4-6 hours of activities a day (which means one or maybe two things), have a list of restaurants and backup options if we have extra time, and go from there.
Lastly, there could be "the best ramen place in the world" but if they like salty and you like spicy, you're still not going to enjoy it. When we recently went to Beijing (I used to live there, my husband's first trip), we skipped Peking Duck, because he's vegetarian. When we were in San Francisco for a weekend, we decided NOT to go to Mama's, because the line was about 4 hours long. For brunch. (You can't make a reservation ahead of time.) My point is there are perfectly valid reasons to not go to the most popular spots, especially if you're not going to get the same experience as those who went before they became popular.
posted by ethidda at 10:31 AM on February 4, 2015
The way I travel, which I got from my mom, is to spend months beforehand thinking about it and looking for stuff to do and coming up with ideas and making lists. Then, when I get to the destination, each day I look at the list of stuff and do what I feel like doing that day. If it's something that must be booked in advance, I do that before going, of course, but for the most part, it's played by ear. I prioritize stuff I really want to do ahead of time. When I got married, what changed about my process is that my husband put everything into a spreadsheet for us to look at, instead of a bunch of printouts.
If, at the destination, we end up missing something, we just wave a hand and say "Next time." Will there be a next time? Maybe. Maybe not.
We have friends who travel with a strict, tightly controlled schedule, and that just boggles our minds, as neither of us can comprehend doing that and enjoying it.
posted by telophase at 11:28 AM on February 4, 2015
If, at the destination, we end up missing something, we just wave a hand and say "Next time." Will there be a next time? Maybe. Maybe not.
We have friends who travel with a strict, tightly controlled schedule, and that just boggles our minds, as neither of us can comprehend doing that and enjoying it.
posted by telophase at 11:28 AM on February 4, 2015
Yep - 1-2 things per day, and maybe a list of "stuff people said is good" so that I can refer to it IF we happen to be around that thing.
I generally plan a Morning Thing, an Afternoon Thing, and an Evening Thing, and generally only one of those things is allowed to be pre-booked/time-sensitive unless it's a day-trip kind of thing. So we may know for sure that we want to go to the Bird Sanctuary, and we have to buy tour tickets for either the 10am or 2pm tour, 2pm is too hot so it needs to be 10am, buy tickets, and then maybe find a reliable breakfast spot on the way, and X is the nearest neighborhood for lunch options.
Research is fine for having information in your head, though, for just-in-case. As an example, many moons ago when we went to Puerto Vallarta for our honeymoon, I happened to read a bunch of TripAdvisor reviews that mentioned that it was common for your cab driver to offer you tours in a private car on your day off, particularly tours up to San Sebastien, which was at that time a tiny mountaintop town accessible by one mountain road that was about to be turned into a 5-lane highway and ruin everything, so see it while you can.
If I hadn't read that, I would have said one million kinds of nope when our cab driver offered just that. And we had a great day and locally-grown coffee and handmade candy from possibly the oldest lady on earth. So glad we did it, but if we hadn't done that we would have done something else.
You just have to accept that you cannot have/eat/do/buy all the things. If you can't have good memories without worrying that someone else got better memories that day, you'll drive yourself insane.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:35 AM on February 4, 2015
I generally plan a Morning Thing, an Afternoon Thing, and an Evening Thing, and generally only one of those things is allowed to be pre-booked/time-sensitive unless it's a day-trip kind of thing. So we may know for sure that we want to go to the Bird Sanctuary, and we have to buy tour tickets for either the 10am or 2pm tour, 2pm is too hot so it needs to be 10am, buy tickets, and then maybe find a reliable breakfast spot on the way, and X is the nearest neighborhood for lunch options.
Research is fine for having information in your head, though, for just-in-case. As an example, many moons ago when we went to Puerto Vallarta for our honeymoon, I happened to read a bunch of TripAdvisor reviews that mentioned that it was common for your cab driver to offer you tours in a private car on your day off, particularly tours up to San Sebastien, which was at that time a tiny mountaintop town accessible by one mountain road that was about to be turned into a 5-lane highway and ruin everything, so see it while you can.
If I hadn't read that, I would have said one million kinds of nope when our cab driver offered just that. And we had a great day and locally-grown coffee and handmade candy from possibly the oldest lady on earth. So glad we did it, but if we hadn't done that we would have done something else.
You just have to accept that you cannot have/eat/do/buy all the things. If you can't have good memories without worrying that someone else got better memories that day, you'll drive yourself insane.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:35 AM on February 4, 2015
I do this, and one thing that has helped is to start keeping a list of the things I enjoyed about a particular trip AFTER I get back. This way, I start to see patterns in what I end up doing and enjoying on trips vs. what I think I will be the PERFECT THING EVER. Part of my own perfectionism/anxiety personality is that I tend not to learn from experiences in the sense of being able to apply my past experiences with my perfectionism anxiety to my current instances of perfectionism anxiety.
So now that I have some lists generated about what I enjoyed doing in past trips and how many things I was actually able to accomplish in one day, I can review these as I plan upcoming trips as a sort of reality check and anxiety/perfectionism diffuser. For example, I was indeed miserable trying to see every museum on my last trip to D.C., but I did love the heck out of sitting in on a Senate session and catching a free concert at the Kennedy Center and so I'll keep those things in mind when I plan my next trip: i.e., less museums, more cultural/civic stuff. It helps.
Short of that, giving myself less choices also helps. Like, I can only choose between three restaurants and stop looking once I have my list of three.
posted by megancita at 11:49 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
So now that I have some lists generated about what I enjoyed doing in past trips and how many things I was actually able to accomplish in one day, I can review these as I plan upcoming trips as a sort of reality check and anxiety/perfectionism diffuser. For example, I was indeed miserable trying to see every museum on my last trip to D.C., but I did love the heck out of sitting in on a Senate session and catching a free concert at the Kennedy Center and so I'll keep those things in mind when I plan my next trip: i.e., less museums, more cultural/civic stuff. It helps.
Short of that, giving myself less choices also helps. Like, I can only choose between three restaurants and stop looking once I have my list of three.
posted by megancita at 11:49 AM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
My wife is an experience maximizer, and she used to get frustrated at my lack of buy-in during the hard core research and planning phase. But she also learned to dial back her expectations of doing all these specific best things, and I learned to play along a little more in the early stages to try to set priorities. And I do my best to reinforce the positive aspects of this planning when things work out well.
The "pick one thing" or "pick a morning thing and an evening thing" plan is kind of how we do it now. My wife's notes include days and hours of operation, so we don't end up trying to do a museum day on Monday, when nearly every museum in Europe is closed, and if we know we want to do a certain thing that closes at 5pm on the dot so you have to get there by 4pm to see it, we can make the optimal call once we're actually on the ground (something like: breakfast ran late, but we needed less time than we expected at a particular museum, so if we grab a döner from that cart there we can head over now). So we'll start in the morning with a loose plan based on days and hours of operation and then adjust by slowing down or speeding up as the case may be.
It helps us to think of our vacation as a time budget, and we've only got so many hours to spend. For example we both acknowledge there's only so much time we're going to enjoy being in museums. My limit is higher than my wife's, but generally our maximum is two hours or two museums in a day, and that could be pushing it. We will also hit an overall museum time limit for a trip, but I'm not sure I could tell you what that limit actually is. Anyway, if you know you're setting a time budget you can use your planning stage to rule out even trying to get to that third or fourth museum, and instead of being a FOMO moment it's an "if we like it, we'll come back."
posted by fedward at 2:22 PM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
The "pick one thing" or "pick a morning thing and an evening thing" plan is kind of how we do it now. My wife's notes include days and hours of operation, so we don't end up trying to do a museum day on Monday, when nearly every museum in Europe is closed, and if we know we want to do a certain thing that closes at 5pm on the dot so you have to get there by 4pm to see it, we can make the optimal call once we're actually on the ground (something like: breakfast ran late, but we needed less time than we expected at a particular museum, so if we grab a döner from that cart there we can head over now). So we'll start in the morning with a loose plan based on days and hours of operation and then adjust by slowing down or speeding up as the case may be.
It helps us to think of our vacation as a time budget, and we've only got so many hours to spend. For example we both acknowledge there's only so much time we're going to enjoy being in museums. My limit is higher than my wife's, but generally our maximum is two hours or two museums in a day, and that could be pushing it. We will also hit an overall museum time limit for a trip, but I'm not sure I could tell you what that limit actually is. Anyway, if you know you're setting a time budget you can use your planning stage to rule out even trying to get to that third or fourth museum, and instead of being a FOMO moment it's an "if we like it, we'll come back."
posted by fedward at 2:22 PM on February 4, 2015 [1 favorite]
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One tip that has helped me a LOT is to go ahead and spend a few hours researching to find one or two awesome, must do/eat/visit *things* per day. But then relax, and let fun happen naturally outside of that scheduled time. You are already doing [whatever] really fun thing! You don't need to fill up each hour with scheduled fun, or make sure to see and do everything in that area to make the trip "worth it". Just focus on the one or two scheduled AWESOME THINGS, and before or after, while traveling to or from those things, just see what you feel like doing and what you happen to come across in the moment. I know that it's easier said than done, but for me, treating each experience like a treat and not just something to do before the next thing (even if that's not your conscious thought) has really increased the fun of trips and events.
posted by sarahnicolesays at 7:42 AM on February 4, 2015 [6 favorites]