Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I have travelled quite a bit myself, and my personal dreams are just dreams and are not actually a description of anything I would actually end up doing - I'm not actually expecting people to do full backpacking when one plans stuff. Completely unstructured travel isn't particularly feasible in practice. Mostly, what I do is the kind of semi-structured self-directed travel that still allows me the ability to wander around a city myself, flaneur-style, and pick and choose what I want to see. That neither requires too much executive function or free time (both of which I lack). There's a gigantic middle ground between "lying on a beach" and "backpacking through the Amazon rainforest".
It's pretty obvious how most hidden things are crap by their nature since most things anywhere are pretty unremarkable, but in my experience most of my favourite destinations have been quite out of the way and not on the average tourist's radar. The ability to make these discoveries is an integral part of travel for me.
EDIT: Also, don't mean to seem like I'm randomly shitting on someone's travel plans here - that's not my intention. Casual conversation about low-stakes topics are just sometimes enjoyable.
How does this combine with lacking free time then? Do you just spend a lot of time researching
Pretty much, yeah. Once I've decided to plan some kind of trip I go all-out, and it also helps that I trawl every square inch of Google Maps extensively in my free time when I don't have anything else to do, and just put pins in every single landmark that looks interesting and that I'd like to see. I hardly watch TV or engage in other passive activities to relax after work, I get bored by that easily, and one of the activities I engage in for fun (aside from researching a bunch about whatever niche topic catches my fancy) is to stake out possible destinations from my armchair. I do this even when I lack travel plans.
It's surprisingly easy to thoroughly map out countries - it's almost a mediative affair, in fact. You build up a gigantic reservoir of interesting sites after even just two months. After a while you get good at it - you can eventually identify the nature of buildings and even natural sites from how they look from the air, temples and traditional houses and so on, and can do further research on them on that basis. I've had family members ask me to plan their trips on their behalf. I come back to them with a gigantic slate of destinations, and see which ones they like.
This level of sheer autism certainly isn't for everyone and I don't expect everyone to engage in this kind of planning, but it works for me. And it feels better in my experience, less like you're getting a surface-level tourist view of a certain destination and more like you're actually experiencing a place outside of the heavily trafficked destinations where everyone gets shunted to. Also, less crowds. Fuck crowds.
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