The two fundamental equations of itinerary planning

1. The harder it will be to change something en route, the more you should plan beforehand. What can make changing the itinerary hard?
   • Competing tourists (high season).
   • Lack of acceptable choices (remote places).
   • Your inability to communicate your desires (foreign language).
2. The more critical an element to later events, the more important it is to reserve it ahead of time. What elements are critical?
   • Long-distance journeys (airplanes). Everyone knows to reserve these.
   • Package tours that leave on particular dates, and the connections to and from them. Missing that cruise ship not only fouls the itinerary, it blackens the mood of the itinerants.
   • Celebration hotels and restaurants. The wedding anniversary two-splotch place? Reserve it before you leave America.
   • Must-sees on the tour bus itineraries. They make restrict access for individual visitors to particular days or times.
   • Stellar, see-it-and-die sights. What if Lascaux is unexpectedly closed the only possible day you can see it?

Before you go

• Do some research online. Like Valdez, the Internet is coming ... to Europe. The best engine I have found is www.google.com. Takes English words as input, returns sorts in scant seconds.

• The less you drive, the more flexibility and fun you will have. (In the Dordogne, our total driving averaged about 150 miles a day, or 21/2 hours in the car.) Tight geography helps. So does hub-and-spoke touring.

• Where possible, incorporate some hub-and-spoke touring instead of vagabonding: three days in one base, four in another. Every time you pack or unpack, you lose 45 minutes (to say nothing of the hassle and backtrack risk if you forget something). Sometimes you are better off picking a location and then doing day-trip loops.

• Design your broad itinerary generally rather than specifically. Use guidebooks to identify a few key highlights in each area and weight the number of days based on a rough-justice approximation. You will refine the trip when you are there.

• Do not micromanage the schedule. Guidebooks make mistakes. Opening times and dates change. Except memorables that you reserve in advance, leave some cushion and use on-the-road adjustment to stitch together each day's goals.

• Allow some free time in every day. Things always take longer than you think. You get lost. You dawdle. You sleep late. (Hey, it's a vacation.) And on the way you learn new attractions: sights you want to add, unexpected closings (per restauro or otherwise). You can always find interesting little sidelines to add in with the extra time you are allowing yourself.

• Make advance hotel reservations at your key destinations. Usually hotels will have vacancies, but sometimes they will be unpredictably full4 or unexpectedly closed. If you have particular targets in mind, make those reservations early. It cost little, creates options, and relieves anxiety.

• Schedule in a vacation from your vacation: spa-type destinations such as lush hotels (we use Michelin red-box), restful sites (Michelin red rocking chairs); or kid-in-the-adult adventures (such as the two days we spent unexpectedly scuba-diving on the Turkish coast). They relieve all that logistical fatigue and selection-guess anxiety ("Where are we eating tonight? How do we get there?")

• Use the fax and (especially) Internet reserve. English is the net's lingua franca: write clearly in simple sentences and anyone will understand you. And you can conduct a much more informed and reliable conversation before you go and get those destination-reservations taken care of easily.

• Do not automatically accept the first hotel offering - shamelessly poor-mouth yourself. One place we emailed offered us a room at $150, and I wrote back with a church-mouse tale that we were traveling on a budget (true if misleading) and really had hoped to make their hotel; did they have anything cheaper? A $95 room promptly materialized, and it proved plenty luxurious for us.

On the road

• Always stay 1+ days ahead on hotels. A hotel reservation in hand saves an hour or two a day.

• When scheduling your day, leave time cushions throughout. Things always take longer than you think and you are going to get lost, always when it is least convenient.

• If you are going the wrong way, turn around. Don't be a genius and cut across country; stay on trails you can navigate. You are in unfamiliar territory reading strange maps with confusing road signs. You will make many wrong turns (five a day is our average). However ignominious it may seem, turning around is almost always the quickest, easiest recovery.

• When in doubt which exit to take from a roundabout (rotary), go around it one extra time just to read the signs. So you look silly doing it - to whom? Who cares? And it gives you potentially vital information.

• Get to your hotel before dark (because everything is much easier to find in daylight than at night). Use the final hour of twilight to find the hotel and check in.

• Continuously read and re-read your guidebooks and maps. Your actual on-the-ground itinerary will inevitably have squiggles that bring you past or near smaller sights that you would not have sought out but are worth a brief look. Having these ready to hand can add entertainments to an otherwise thin day.

• Plan tomorrow's sequence the night before. This is the time to check opening hours, point-to-point driving, and other considerations.

• Accept the inevitability of the occasional large backtrack (like 25 miles). You are entering unfamiliar territory, and some events will inevitably take much longer or shorter than you thought. Rather than stretch things out or unreasonably compress them, recognize that two hours' autoroute driving can cover 150 miles and put you into a whole new territory. So the track looks tangled - think of it in terms of minutes, not miles.

• The phone is your friend, no matter how bad your command of the local language. Use it: for reservations at hotels and restaurants. (On the phone, learn to say hello and please in the local language. Stagger along a word or two, then ask nicely, "Do you speak English?" Invariably they will say, "a little" and it will prove plenty good enough to decode your questions.)

• If you need to know something complicated and don't speak the language, ask the hotel concierge to do your phoning for you. They are always happy to do this and you can learn what you need to know.

• Be weather-influenced. Sights magical in good weather are dreary in rain, fog or cold.

• Picnic lunches not only save calories, they create time and flexibility. In France, the morning trip to the bakery and supermarket can set you up for the day (so that you can eat late if you are dining late) and make your lunch a pleasant 30 minutes rather than 75 or 90.

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ã Copyright 2002 David Alexander Smith