When you decide on a city or country to visit, you usually have a reason for making that place your destination. Whether it's the Colosseum in Rome or the Eiffel Tower in Paris, maybe the Mayan ruins in Mexico or the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, you know why its a personal must see attraction! But once you've seen it, you still have the rest of your vacation left. So what's next? Here are our best researching tips for ways to fill up your vacation days and get the most out of each destination. Regardless of lazy vs. active vacationing, everyone wants to see and do something new on their trip. We've compiled a list of the ways we like to research things to do, places to visit, and food to eat when we travel. We've found that having an idea of what we want to see or a place we want to grab a bite at helps structure our day so we're not doing the whole "what do you want to do?", "Umm, I don't know. What do you want to do?" game while on vacation. Here are our top researching tricks and tips. 1. Once you've picked a place to visit, buy a guide book. Just imagine how many times you've whipped out your smart phone to look up something small like business hours or a street address, now imagine doing this in a city you don't have cell data in... Guide books are more important than you think. Many guide books will have the must-see attractions in them with business hours, addresses, directions, and even when you should stop in to avoid lines. If you are going international, get one with a really good city map/public transit map. I can't tell you how many times we've relied on a guide book for references and having a purse or pocket sized book that you can keep with you is key. You'll use it more than you think. Now domestic travel is a different story. When we travel in the states, we usually have a note or memo in our smartphones with all the places we want to visit, researched previously through Pinterest or yelp (more on that later) that we can pull up for reference. We usually include the street address in the memo that way we can get directions without re-researching it on the spot. We've also downloaded apps specific to the city we're in. Like in New York, we had a metro app and a public restrooms app. For Disney World we downloaded an app with bus transfer info and another for waiting times for each ride. 2. You've figured out where you want to vacation, now you need to see what neighborhoods are right for you. This will vary depending on what stage of life you're currently in. If you're young and ready to party, staying closer to the bar scenes makes more sense. If you have kids, finding family friendly areas is obviously ideal. If you're planning to do a lot of site-seeing, staying close to public transit is necessary. Having an idea of what you want to experience will keep you from wasting time in a neighborhood not right for you. Many times, we will read blog posts or travel reviews to figure out the pockets of the city that we can't miss. Knowing the areas you want to explore can help when it comes to figuring out where you should rest your head. Do you want to be close to those neighborhoods or would you prefer to take public transit there instead?
3. So you know the city you want to be in, you might have an idea of the neighborhoods you want to visit, now you have to figure out where you should stay. If you are doing this trip planning thing on your own, use TripAdvisor to figure out the best hotels in each area of the city. There are user reviews, photos, maps, and it will even tell you prices for your travel dates. You can still use TripAdvisor if you are booking a trip with a guided tour company. Many times, tour companies will allow you to pick hotels from a list and most of the hotels will be very similar but you can get a feel for all of them through personal reviews on TA. It's our go to source for hotel stay. If you are feeling more adventurous, HomeAway and AirBnB are host companies that allow people to put their homes or apartments up for nightly or weekly rent. And for the even more adventurous, there is a company called couchsurfing. You've guessed it, you can contact hosts who are offering up their couches for a night or two, usually for free. Just be careful when doing this, especially if you're traveling alone! 4. Up in No. 2 we mentioned we read articles and blog reviews pertaining to the city we're prepping to visit. Our greatest online resource is Pinterest. I have a Pinterest account and I will tell you, I use that site seriously when looking up things to do before we travel. Pinterest is the greatest way to find blogs, magazine articles, and personal reviews to anything you want to discover in a new city. I can simply type "Portland Neighborhoods" in the search box and out comes articles pinned by users on all things Portland. Best Portland neighborhoods to explore, blogger guide - best things to do in Portland, girlfriend getaway to Portland... All organized with a main picture for each article so you can pick based on what grabs your eye first. Sometimes you will find images with no material behind it but if you dig a little deeper you can usually find a name, location, etc. to help pinpoint what you are looking for. One other online resource we like is Yelp. We use it most for food resources. Sometimes, bloggers or magazine companies will be biased on their favorite dessert or lunch spot so hitting up Yelp helps support those opinions. If it's reviewed well overall on yelp, it's usually a winner. We've found that the more time we spend researching the city, the more experiences we get to partake in. The hours spent ahead of time researching things to do and see, allows for more exploring when we're on vacation and less arguing/wasting time sitting in a hotel room trying to map out the day. Until Next Time, C + D
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