Backpacking Boisterously

What’s the best way to travel?  A carefully thought out itinerary that has an airtight schedule and is run through like a well-oiled machine?  Or a loosey goosey “plan” that allows for whatever adventure comes your way?  I’ve experienced both, and I think I’m leaning more towards the spontaneity side nowadays.

The best trip I ever took was a two month biking excursion in Europe with one of my best friends straight out of high school.  A little over the halfway point, after following our planned routes pretty closely, we decided to make a change.  Our original plan had called for biking through the interior of Portugal, but we completely winged it and decided to bike from Sevilla, Spain along the coastline all the way up to Lisbon.  It ended up working out perfectly.  Bike for a couple of hours in the morning, spend the day on the beach, then bike in the cooler evenings until we found our next campground.  That was our schedule for roughly two weeks, and it was pure bliss.  All because we ditched our carefully laid plans.

I think the best of both worlds is a sort of waypoint system.  Have dates set for when you should be in a place, like checkpoints, but don’t plan your routes down to the day.  If I want to skip something in order to stay somewhere that is unbelievably awesome, this method allows me to do it.  More flexibility is always nice.  As long as you get to those waypoints on time, you can skip all around in between.  That’s how I’ve planned my last few trips, and they’ve turned out golden.

Flexible!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.