How to prepare for a long trip: the research process
I am a librarian, and if I even wonder something, I usually find a reliable website or good book to answer my questions. I firmly advocate consulting various resources when planning your trip.
Planning my three and a half month trek has taken hours and hours of research. My trip is firmly planned, but loosely. I am not planning like this: six days in Paris, take the overnight train to Madrid, spend two and a half days, then go. But I have the names of good places to see, fabulous museums, amazing vegetarian restaurants, maps, the best guidebook for my purpose, and it is all because I spent a lot of time at the research process.
What your local library can do for you
The librarian in me aside, I still love libraries. Libraries are great for the traveller. If you have a large public library near you that you can use, you are set. Do not underestimate the power of consortia: the small branch of the Brooklyn Public Library near my house has a paltry selection of guides, and the Central Brooklyn Public Library has caused me to check out thirty travel books at once.
Also, if you are travelling, libraries are often the only place with a free internet connection, heat, free public toilets, and somewhere to relax.
At your local library, pick up books, flip through them, pile them around you, ask a librarian for help finding what you want if you do not see it. Check the catalogue and your library's homepage for travel links. Take books home. The best part? It is all free. Well, paid by a paltry portion of your tax dollars. Return them on time, or renew them online, to avoid fines.
Most public libraries use the Dewey Decimal system, so on entering, head for the 900s. If your library uses Library of Congress, travel is in the early section of G. The early 900s hold travel writing, travel memoirs and general guides, the sort of thing that helps when you do not yet know where you want to go. Titles like The Best American Travel Writing are a good way in. Move on down the 900s and you reach the geography-specific shelves. Travel memoirs are usually kept in the travel section, though some catalogers disagree and file them under biography.
One thing that has got better: most library cards now come with free digital borrowing, so you can read current guidebooks on a phone or tablet through your library rather than buying them. That solves the old problem of a guidebook being both essential and too heavy to carry. Plenty of cards also include free language courses and newspaper archives.
Choosing between guidebooks
Before heading out, I debated between Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring, Let's Go Europe, Rough Guide Europe, Hangin' Out in Europe and Let's Go Western Europe. For my needs, LP Europe seemed the best bet.
Some of those are gone now. Hangin' Out in Europe is long out of print, and Let's Go, which was written by Harvard students, is much diminished. Lonely Planet and Rough Guides are both still going, and Bradt is worth adding for places the big two treat thinly.
The method matters more than the list, and the method still works: borrow three, read the same chapter in each, and keep the one whose writer you trust. They are not interchangeable, and you can tell within a few pages.
I have also checked out countless other travel books to help me figure out: where are the best places in Italy? What are some good hostels? What is the club scene like in Amsterdam? What are my best options for the train? I found the answers in the library. I pulled books off the shelf at random, because I liked the title, or, hmm, Croatia sounded interesting, and I definitely want to go to Italy. I photocopied maps, glued them to my walls, traced fingers across lines and held my breath. I knew I would go, it would be done.
Websites
There are many unreliable websites out there, and unfortunately, some terrible travel writing. Do not trust everything you read, especially on the internet, because anyone can post anything even if it is not true.
On websites, look for four things.
- Credentials. The name of the person, and why they have the expertise to write this.
- Currency. Five years can mean huge changes.
- Validity. Does what they say make sense? If you have to take everything with a grain of salt, that is probably not a good travel resource.
- Contact information. A site with no way to contact the author does not make me trust their materials.
If a website is a .com they are usually in it to make some sort of profit. Not always, but check whether they are so focused on selling you their unique travel items that it distracts from finding the proper information. Sites like BootsnAll have message boards, travel articles and other useful tips, with minimal advertising. Sites ending .gov are US government, and offer useful if occasionally over-cautious information. Nonprofits end in .org and often have terrific information.
Those four tests have aged extremely well, and they are more necessary now than when I wrote them, because the failure modes have multiplied.
- Currency is the one that catches people. An article can be three years old and read as though it were written this morning. Look for a date on the page, and if there is not one, that is your answer.
- A great deal of travel writing is now generated rather than written. The tell is a page with no opinion in it: ten things to do, all of them fine, none of them recommended over another, no sign anyone went. A writer who has actually been somewhere will tell you what they did not like.
- Ranked lists are usually paid. "Best hostels in Prague" is an affiliate page far more often than it is a judgement, and the ranking is commission, not quality.
- Reviews are gamed at both ends. Read the middling ones, three and four stars, where people describe what the place is actually like rather than being furious or delighted.
The .gov point still holds, and it is worth being specific: your own foreign ministry's travel pages are the authoritative source on visas and entry rules, and nothing else is. And for anything with a timetable or a price, go to the operator's own site. Everything else is a copy of a copy, and copies go stale.
Knowing when to stop
Research has a point of diminishing returns and it arrives sooner than you expect. The tell is when you start re-reading things you have already read. Once you know what is worth your time, roughly what things cost, and how you get from the station to your bed, you are done. The rest you find out by being there, which is the reason you are going.
So yes, I am a nerdy librarian who clips articles from magazines and sends them to her friends, but I think preparing for this trip has been the best research project I have ever taken on. I found my research skills have improved, but most of all, I have learned a great deal about the places I will go to and will not, and feel that by planning smart I will travel smart.
Only @ your library!
Posted 27 May 2005 by Cherie in Eurail Planning