Life's Little Adventures

Whats wrong with Guided Tours?

I can understand why some people prefer to experience Europe (or any other destination) on guided tours rather than on their own. Tours are easy. They're non-threatening. And they can be realatively inexpensive. But they're just never as rewarding as independent travel.

     For one thing, people on tours are treated more as tourists than as guests. The smiles they get are purchased smiles with hands out for tips, not a genuine friendliness or a desire to communicate.

    Another point is that many, if not most, tour directors lead their sheep to shops and restaurants from which they derive a percentage of the "take." These are seldom "bargains," and they do not result in an authentic experience.

    Then, too, guided tours tend to herd their charges into "attractions" that they consider to be of mass appeal, often at the bequest of the local tourist authorities — which are, after all, businesses. They seldom venture "off the beaten path."

    Plus, except in rare cases, you don't get to choose your travel mates. They may well be great people, or they could be unbearable louts. But whoever they are, you're stuck with them.

    Worst of all, you don't always get to see what YOU want to see.

Independent travelers, on the other hand, enjoy the satisfaction of having accomplished something on their own. And they have more fun doing it (photo, right).

    That's why I do what I do.

    What I do is explore on my own two feet, poke around promising places, develop a rational approach to them, connecting as much as possible with the locals, and then write and draw maps about it. I've been doing this since 1976, when I launched my Great Trips project, which later morphed into today's Daytrips series of guide books.

After checking out the two above links and some of the free sample chapters they lead to, please visit my personal page on Amazon.com to read what others have said.

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WHY DAYTRIPS?

My style of independent travel goes all the way back to my military service in Japan during the 1950s. Actually, my first memory of a one-day trip from home was even earlier, when my dad took me to the New York World's Fair in 1939 — where I marveled at those wonders to come. There were other early trips, too, usually by trolley car, bus, or steam train as we didn't have a car during the Great Depression or World War II.

A trip to England in 1975 really changed my life. I was over there on an ill-conceived quest to try my hand at movie making when I discovered that writing about travel destinations was much more to my liking than filming them. This got me started on the Great Trips / Europe project of creating brochure-guides for one-day adventures, described elsewhere on this blog.

Out of that experience came the opportunity to write travel guide books with a daytrips theme for a long-established New York publisher, Hastings House.

This is how I make the point in my Daytrips guidebooks:

"The word "Daytrip" may not have made it into dictionaries yet, but for experienced independent travelers it represents the easiest, most natural, and often the least expensive approach to exploring a fresh new destination from a fixed base, such as a major city.

While not the answer to every travel situation, daytrips offer significant advantages over point-to-point touring following a set plan. Here are a dozen good reasons for considering the daytrip approach:

1. Freedom from the constraints of a fixed itinerary. You can go wherever you feel like going whenever the mood strikes you.
2. Freedom from the burden of luggage. Your bags remain in your hotel while you run around with only a guidebook and camera.
3. Freedom from the anxiety of reservation foul-ups. You don't have to worry each day about whether that night's lodging will actually materialize.
4. The flexibility of making last-minute changes to allow for unexpected weather, serendipitous discoveries, changing interests, new-found passions, and so on.
5. The flexibility to take breaks from sightseeing whenever you feel tired or bored, without upsetting a planned itinerary. Why not sleep late in your base city for a change?
6. The opportunity to sample different travel experiences without committing more than a day to them.
7. The opportunity to become a "temporary resident" of your base city. By staying there for a week or so you can get to know it in depth, becoming familiar with the local restaurants, shops, theaters, night life, and other attractions — enjoying them as a native would.
8. The convenience of not having to hunt for a hotel each day, along with the security of knowing that a familiar room is waiting back in your base city.
9. The convenience of not having to pack and unpack your bags each day. Your clothes can hang in a closet where they belong, or even be sent out for cleaning.
10. The convenience (and security!) of having a fixed address in your base city, where friends, relatives, and business associates can reach you in an emergency. It is often difficult to contact anyone who changes hotels daily.
11. The economy of staying at one hotel on a discounted longer-term basis, especially with airline package plans. You can make reservations for your base city without sacrificing any flexibility at all.
12. The economy of getting the most value out of a railpass. Daytripping is ideally suited to rail travel since the best train service operates out of base-city hubs. This is especially true in Europe.

Above all, daytrips ease the transition from tourist to accomplished traveler. Even if this is your first trip abroad, you can probably handle an uncomplicated one-day excursion on your own. The confidence gained will help immensely when you tackle more complex destinations, freeing you from the limitations of guided tours and putting you in complete control of your own trip."

MOST OF THE DAYTRIPS BOOKS CAN BE READ ONLINE FOR FREE AT GOOGLE BOOKS.

MANY FREE CHAPTERS ARE AVAILABLE RIGHT HERE ON THIS BLOG.

They're all available from Amazon. To get there, just click on their ad in the left column, then enter Daytrips under Books on their main page.

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Sample Daytrips Chapters

CLICK HERE for links to free sample chapters from my Daytrips series of guidebooks. You can download, print and use them. If you like them, you might even buy a book and help feed me. Thanks for looking.

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Amazon Connect

A FANTASTIC NEW SERVICE FROM AMAZON:

Amazon Connect opens a wide door for continuous dialog between authors and their readers. It also lets readers and prospective book buyers get to know something about the author, such as a short biography, their activities, plans, likes and dislikes, and whatever else they want to reveal about themselves. And there's usually a picture of them!

Find out more about this exciting new service by visiting their site.

And see my new posting there.

A New Owner, A New Book

A NEW OWNER, A NEW BOOK

Click here for the previous post on this, the publishing thread.

Eric Kampmann, the new owner of Hastings House, published the first edition of Daytrips in France, and had me update the previous two books as well. He then suggested an improved London book plus books on Italy and also on the Low Countries — and agreed to pay for much of it. Thus began work on expansion of my first book, now titled Daytrips in Britain.

No longer limited to trips out of London, the new guide was to also encompass Scotland and Wales. So, on Friday, June 13th 1986, I boarded British Airways flight 174 to London. A bus and a subway took me to my favorite cheap digs, the ABC Hotel on Sussex Gardens, near Paddington Station. Updating the London trips went quickly, and in a few days I was off on something more adventurous.

Paul Weiss, the president of BritRail Travel International in New York, had suggested a really convoluted rail journey through the mountainous wilds of North Wales. This begins in London by paying the closest possible attention to schedules and connections. The first ride is from London to Shrewsbury, then to Machynlleth in Wales, then on to Porthmadog — where the fun begins.

Here you board an ancient narrow-gauge steam train of the private Ffestiniog Railway, built in the 1830s to haul slate from the quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog. During the 13½-mile journey the train huffs and puffs its way through the spectacular scenery of Snowdonia National Park, climbing over 700 feet and doubling around itself in a great horseshoe bend. Loving my comfort, I opted for the first-class observation car, which has the best views, widest seats, and where draft beer is served.

At the end of the line, by the slate quarries, a transfer is made to a regular commuter train headed for Llandudno Junction, where you again transfer to a main line express and head back to London via Chester or Crewe. It was a very long day, starting at dawn and ending in the late evening, but really worth if you're nutty about trains. I don't know if this trip is still possible from London, or if you would have to take it from Chester or Shrewsbury instead.

I took those photos in B&W, then added a sort of sepia to them. I still love B&W photography.

Next time, it's off to Scotland.

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DIGITAL TRAVEL GUIDES...the wave of the future?

As both a writer and an editor of travel guides, I'm all too familiar with the problems confronting the business. Here are a few of my thoughts, more will follow later.

All printed travel guides have one problem in common: they date fast. Travel is a constantly evolving experience requiring up-to-date information. New attractions open as old ones fade away. Restaurants come and go. Museums change their hours as quickly as they change their entry fees. And travelers' expectations change — what thrilled them last year becomes a bore today. At best, printed travel guides are updated only once a year, and usually not that often. I've given a lot of thought to this, and have decided that an ideal solution would be to publish individual guides as constantly-updated digital files distributed over the Internet. Of course, much of this is currently available for free by visiting tourist websites, but remember that this is — of necessity — highly biased information designed to promote their attractions. Others are beholden to their advertisers. Government-operated tourist websites are not much better as their real constituents are the people who profit from your visit and support their politicians.

Another problem with printed guides is that they are in book form, with pages too small to contain decent maps, and too thick to easily schlepp around as you trek from one attraction to the next. What would be ideal would be to have a folded brochure for each destination, containing maps, photos, perhaps a walking tour, restaurant and shopping suggestions, travel information, and honest, unbiased descriptions of the attractions. Actually, I tried this once, but that was way back in the days when offset printing was the only practical option. And that meant printing thousands of copies of each brochure, some of which sold fast while others lingered as their data got older and older.

HOW IT COULD BE DONE:

Now, the Brave New World of the Internet has opened the door for an entirely new way to distribute current travel information. Instead of creating bulky books that cover an entire country or continent, new up-to-date PDF files of each single destination (city, town, village, mountain, lake, whatever) can be produced and uploaded to a website. This site has a description of each file, and one or more sample pages. A potential customer selects those of interest and adds them to their "shopping cart." After entering credit-card info and delivery address, they leave the site. The selected files are then sent to them via e-mail, or perhaps they could be downloaded directly from the main site. In either case, the customer buys very complete and current files of only the places that interest them. They can then print these out on paper (as many copies as they wish) and/or load them into a PDA or similar device that is easily carried. It is also possible for the publisher to print them out on demand and snail-mail them to the buyer as a service to those without good printers.

Prices for these files would be quite reasonable since no printing, storage, middlemen, or shipping costs are involved. The concept is very similar to the hugely successful music file downloads such as Apple's i-Tunes or the various MP3 sites. Quantity discounts could be offered.

WHAT IS NEEDED TO MAKE IT WORK:

We — myself and my fellow writers — have the skills, the travel experience, and the ability to produce a finished result complete with digital maps and photos. What is needed is an interested party with Internet marketing experience, some capital, and good business acumen. Interested? Contact me.

A few samples from my Daytrips books are already on this website; more are on the way. Of course, the proposed idea would use PDF files, with fancier graphics.

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