Travel: To Prepare, or Too Prepared?

How much travel preparation do you do? Do you make sure you have housing for every night? Do you just wing it and hope you find a place?

As you may have gathered from my last post, I have been preparing for my upcoming trip by doing my homework. I have used tourism websites and iPhone travel apps to gather a list of sites to see. I have written an itinerary with which sites to see on which days, and included their addresses, open times, and entrance fees. I have started rereading the fictional books that have inspired my travel destinations. I have also found that I can walk around the interior of Green Gables using GoogleMaps. No need to even leave home any more. Thanks Google. If you’re wondering, I also scheduled in some free days in case we happen upon other things we want to do or places to see.

Therefore I was feeling pretty good about myself when I plunked myself down on the couch for some good old Youtubing today. While watching a video that had nothing to do with my destinations, and by whatever algorithm Youtube uses (which I don’t even want to think about) a suggested video popped up titled Life and Times of L. M. Montgomery. Suddenly I shamefully realized that I haven’t done any research about the authors that are really the inspiration for my destinations! And I take off tomorrow! Why hadn’t I thought about researching the authors backgrounds??

I can now tell you that L. M. Montgomery, known as Maud, had a depressingly sad life. I will share more of her story in future posts from Prince Edward Island, but this has certainly put a new spin on the sites I plan to see! I also learned that several volumes worth of Maud’s personal journals have been published. Somehow I had never come across this fact either. I should have started reading them months ago! Yikes!

Panic set in. I’m not prepared! And then I began to wonder, is it possible to over prepare? If I had thoroughly done my research, would there be anything left to learn during the trip? Where’s the line between being prepared and being over prepared?

While I continue to ponder my lack of preparation, I’m off to pack!