Spontaneity Planning

Sometimes plans don't work out. I used to plan to the finest details my vacation. But once on vacation, things happened, and plans change, and I only was able to complete half the things I had planned for. Then I went completely opposite by only planning where and when my vacation would start and end. My wife and I spent a whole month in Europe. I got round trip plane tickets for Dublin, Ireland and a Eurail Pass good for all of Western Europe. That was all the planning I did. We just did things spontaneoulsy. We'd get up in the morning and ask, what do we want to do today? Sometimes that meant visiting the place we were at, sometimes it meant going to the train station and picking our next location. We didn't have any hotel reservations, so we checked out hostels. About half way through our vacation, we wound up in Frieberg, Germany with no vacancies at any hostel. Fortunately, when we lamented about our situation at a local bar (gasthaus), the owner helped us find a hotel nearby. From that point forward, we decided to make sure we had accomodations before we trekked out to another location.

Keep in mind, while somewhat stressful, it was our most epic and fun vacation, visiting eight countries and finding great spots to enjoy, meeting interesting people, and learning more about the culture your surroundings. So my take-away here is, yes, you have to do some planning, but leave room for a little sponteneity so you can find interesting places that would be overlooked otherwise.