You are taking a vacation. How do you roll?

Haven’t been on vacation in 5+ years. :(

Plan all the major events and book a hotel.

Ahoda @ 19/5/2018 18:58

Haven’t been on vacation in 5+ years. :(

Kids can do that for you.

We have done it each way. It depends on where we're going.

General preference is book rooms, plan one, maybe 2 things, but leave some room to explore and choose stuff based on local recs, etc...

All of my vacations in the last 9 years have been driving to see family either for spring break, thanksgiving, or christmas, so I guess 'throw some shit in the car and figure it out' is most accurate.

Plan on one destination and maybe 1/2 things to do along the way, but generally just go with the flow!

Book the hotel, plan one destination and see what else there is to do when you get there.
usually this

Throw some shit in the car and see where you end up.
we started doing this and its great

Even when we've gone to Europe we tend to plan just beginning and end locations and then play it by ear along the way in between. Otherwise you spend too much time trying to keep the schedule when instead you can say "Fuck it- let's just hang here another night."

Depends on where we're going. I've never flown for a vacation but if that was the case, I think it'd be a lot more precise. I always do road trips. And road trips lead to a lot of spontaneous activities. So typically I'll have the reason for the destination in mind and go from there. I rarely ever book a hotel well in advance because I'm not particularly picky about them.

I like to book the hotel and major events, but it's usually the hotel and like one event. End up wasting too much time!

vladykins @ 20/5/2018 20:04

Even when we've gone to Europe we tend to plan just beginning and end locations and then play it by ear along the way in between. Otherwise you spend too much time trying to keep the schedule when instead you can say "Fuck it- let's just hang here another night."

That's great if it works out but they may be booked up for the next night. Also, if you have a hotel already booked in another city/country, you could have cancellation fees. I usually have a plan and I definitely planned things out when I went to Europe - there was no way I was going there without reservations lol. Mostly just hotels being pre-booked and one overnight train was booked beforehand. For all the other trains we just bought tickets as we went. And the events weren't purchased beforehand but I pretty much knew the things I wanted to do/see. Also, Rick Steves helped a lot!

Buffy @ 21/5/2018 10:30

vladykins @ 20/5/2018 20:04 Even when we've gone to Europe we tend to plan just beginning and end locations and then play it by ear along the way in between. Otherwise you spend too much time trying to keep the schedule when instead you can say "Fuck it- let's just hang here another night." That's great if it works out but they may be booked up for the next night. Also, if you have a hotel already booked in another city/country, you could have cancellation fees. I usually have a plan and I definitely planned things out when I went to Europe - there was no way I was going there without reservations lol. Mostly just hotels being pre-booked and one overnight train was booked beforehand. For all the other trains we just bought tickets as we went. And the events weren't purchased beforehand but I pretty much knew the things I wanted to do/see. Also, Rick Steves helped a lot!

We've never had a problem except for one place- Dublin on the weekend. We had no idea that because the road infrastructure is so awful that everyone who wants to party in Dublin stays the weekend there, so when we rolled in on a Friday everything was booked up and we ended up staying in a little scary B&B downtown Friday night, then Saturday morning I got on the phone and found a super nice place that had an opening. Other than that, we've never had a problem booking a place to stay. It also gives us a chance to see if the hotel is nice; there is nothing worse than booking multiple nights somewhere and then when you get there you are like "Oh fuck this is awful!" So when we travel we basically have rough ideas of timing on where we want to be and then play it by ear. For example, with Greece we planned our first night in Athens, our ferry down to Crete and first night in Heraklion, and our nights in Rhodes (since we had to fly Heraklion to Rhodes). Everything else we got in a car and did on the fly- whether it was driving around Crete and deciding to stay on a little place on the Libyan Sea, or hitting an awesome hotel in Delphi and deciding we were gonna spend another night there, the extra night we stayed in Olympia, and the cool James Bondesque place we found in Nafplion. And this was before you could find hotels quickly using a phone, which makes the whole thing even easier now.