With one trip under my belt this year and another trip on the horizon, I thought I would share the my favorite thing I have learned along the way about planning a trip.
Travel Guides. Instagram.
That’s it. These two things were the best and easiest way I found interesting things to do on vacation.
Let me explain….
With our North Carolina trip, Kyle took the lead with the bulk of the planning- flights, car rental and hotels. I planned what we were to do when we actually got to North Carolina.
For North Carolina, I was lucky in the fact that I follow a few bloggers that live in North Carolina and they had some really detailed travel guides. I used these travel guides as a start to figure out what we should do in North Carolina.
From the travel guides, I started Googling what the places were that were mentioned. Google also provided me stories in my Google News about places and things in North Carolina that I didn’t find yet.
Instagram was really helpful too! Searching the destination in Instagram, pulled up all the posts, accounts and hashtags that were relevant. Searching through the posts, I found travel guides that were item specific- best bars, best attractions, best waterfalls, etc. Watching the video and reading the post, I then found more specific travel accounts for North Carolina. Going by the ‘verified’ accounts, I would do my research to find where to eat, what to do, and what to see.
I was shocked how easy it was to put together a list of things that looked interesting to do. From that list, I would go to the website for that bar/restaurant/activity/attraction to find out more information and determine if it was something we could do while we were there. It was so hard choosing what to do because there were so many fun things, I wanted to do but we didn’t have enough time to do all those things.
It sounds like you start at a travel guide then you basically fall down a rabbit hole of information which lead me on some pretty awesome adventures and created some great experiences.
As a novice traveler, I started with my everyday life- mine happened to involve North Carolina Bloggers by sheer luck- and I went from there. Jumping down that rabbit hole and to see what interesting things I could find. I was not disappointed with what I found. I can’t wait to visit North Carolina again. Waterfall hopping anyone?!
How do you plan your activities and adventures for your vacations? Let me know in the comments below.
[[ …and I think to myself, what a wonderful world…]]
I typically Google the area we're staying with "thing to do" or "attractions" linked to it or I search on Pinterest for "things to do in/ around" and then we go from there.
Oh! Pinterest Is a great idea too!!!