Travel Planning

If all my posting seems to be somewhat haphazard at the moment, I hope you will bear with me.  I am aware of the scattershot approach that I've taken to date to writing, but I am also trying to capture all of the disparate ideas that come to me, in hopes that perhaps one will finally take root and grow into a theme.

The theme for today, however, is travel planning.  I tend to be somewhat fanatical about this, especially when going somewhere completely new.  I believe I've mentioned this before, but I will go and find multiple travel guide references, reading and flipping through each until I've almost memorized the glowing prose.  (Again, strongly tempted to go straight into a travel guide comparison at this point, but I'll refrain until a later date.)  At that point, I start to make the starting list, which eventually turns into an almost day-by-day plan for our time.  At the risk of running everyone off, you'll get to see the inner workings of my planning process over this and the next few posts, as I make plans for a visit to Savannah, Georgia.

While I don't yet have an official list of places I want to go, Savannah has popped up in discussions before.  This time, I have a few extra days off at the end of the month, and so the possibility of a trip came up.  The original idea was to go to North Carolina, but that turned out to be too much driving for the short time that we have, so a second glance at the map offered up a few different options.  The whole thing was inspired by a Lonely Planet travel guide that I think is out of print now - The Carolinas, Georgia, & the South TRIPS.  I think they've subsequently merged much of the material into other books, but if you're interested in Southern travel, I'd highly recommend a copy.  Travel material about the South is hard to come by, with a few notable exceptions.  (Everyone seems to want to spill ink about New Orleans, and there's no dearth of Florida suggestions.)

Unfortunately, although the book provides a broad spectrum of ideas and starting points, it turns out to be dreadfully scarce on deep details.  I suspect that this is the case for the TRIPS series altogether, but the fact is that although there's enough detail to pique my interest, there's simply not enough to feel like I know what we should do once we arrive.  And thus, the search for another travel guide begins.  A quick review of the USA guides from multiple publishers confirms what I already suspected - those guides simply won't do for the detail that I want for Savannah.

A visit to the book store results in a new addition to the travel guide library - this time, Fodor's gets the nod for their Savannah guide.  There may be others out there, but this was the one I could find that seemed to fit the need the best.  Now to begin reading.