Be Your Own Tour Guide
You don't always have to pay the experts for quality exploration
In Mission: Wanderlust, I write and podcast about our family’s travel adventures and the things that we have learned along the way.
I honestly prefer being my own tour guide.
Yes, I am notoriously cheap and don’t want to pay for something that I can do myself, but I also hate being dependent on the plans and whims of those outside of my family unit.
While there are times that I appreciate a good tour, more often than not, we prefer to make our own plans and go where we want, when we want. While sometimes relying on our own schedule means that we get started later than planned or finish later than we should, we generally find that we are much happier with our experiences when we do the planning.
For example, there was the nine-day trip to and from Indiana to Yellowstone with carefully planned stops. Then there was the whirlwind tour of the Washington D.C. monuments and memorials on our bikes, whizzing past everyone who was walking or riding on busses to each stop. Or the tour of the Gettysburg battlefields that we took on our bikes when we didn’t have kids and we could go at our own pace. Even better, there was the tour around O’ahu on a Slingshot with a vague idea of the places we wanted to stop at and the only restriction being the time we needed to return our rental.
For us, being our own tour guide is about the freedom to see and do what we want at our own pace.
So how can you successfully be your own tour guide?
Do a Google search to discover the “must-sees” where you are visiting
Every time we visit a national park site, we make sure to look at the recommended stops in the park for the time frame that we will be visiting. When we visit a new city, we look up the highly recommended places to visit, compare those recommendations to our personal interests, and select the places that will fit into our visiting time frame. When I decided to become a local tourist in Galveston while we were still living in Houston, a simple Google search is how I decided which places I should definitely visit and I hit most of the locations that stuck out to me on the first and the second tourist visit to the island. As I’ve discussed in a previous post, you probably won’t get to visit everything on the “must-see” lists, but it’s a good way to start narrowing down your choices.
Look up the itinerary for popular tours to replicate them
Similar to a simple Google search, looking for local tours and the itineraries for those tours can help you find points of interest in unfamiliar places. We did this twice in Hawaii. When we went on our personal tour on O’ahu I had found an island tour that highlighted places along the coast where the bus would take local tourists. Since we were doing it on our own, I looked at the map that we picked up with our Slingshot rental, circled the places that were on the tour I had found, and we made sure to stop at most of the locations at our own pace. We did the same thing as we traveled to Volcanoes National Park on the Big Island. Jeff had found a tour that included places we didn’t know existed, including a bakery and a black sand beach. We had the freedom of a rental car, could stay at the national park for as long as we wanted, and we made memorable highlight stops along the way.
Make a theme for your vacation and find the places that fit that theme
I’ve written about how much I struggle with my desire to do all the things, but I really do know how to pick and choose what I want to do when I’m forced to do so.
In an early marriage trip to Key West with Jeff’s family, we decided to make history the focus of our selected tours. In between snorkeling and kayaking and enjoying the island nightlife, we toured the shipwreck museum, Ernest Hemingway’s house, and a nighttime ghost tour. On an island with so much to see and do, just picking those few items and sticking to a theme helped us to have a better appreciation of the nightlife we experienced and the Keys, in general.
Several years ago Jeff and I went to Gettysburg for the 250th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg. There is a lot to do in the national military park and the surrounding area, but we agreed that we would focus on both anniversary celebrations and places just related to the war. That meant we could go to the reenactment but we were going to drive right past the Eisenhauer home. It helped us plan what we wanted to see in the city and what we could admit we just didn’t have time for. And we probably saw and did more than we would have if we had gone on a tour for an entire day.
Yes, allowing someone else to do the planning work can sometimes work in our favor, but we’ve discovered that more often than not, we are happier when we do the planning and executing ourselves. It isn’t for everyone, but it is worth considering if you have the time to spend a little bit of time on the internet researching your planned destination.
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