If you know me, then you’ll know that I love to travel.
I studied Lesiure and Tourism at college and thought I’d found my dream job when I managed to get a job in a local travel agency when I left there but as much as I loved the job, the pay wasn’t great and when I bought my first house, I needed to change my career path in pursuit of a better paying job.
I managed to get a good job and have worked my way up and now I’m in a very lucky position that I can afford to travel a little bit – albeit on a budget.
The excitement of booking a holiday never gets old and for me, the planning of the holiday gives me almost as much enjoyment as the holiday itself – sad, I know but true.
This post isn’t about booking a holiday but rather about what to do when you’ve booked a holiday to make sure you get the most out of your stay. It’s about learning what’s around the area you’re staying in so you can really make the most of your time away.
I’m going to use our recent holiday to Lake Garda in Italy as an example but this works (tried and tested) for everywhere.
Once we’d booked our holiday, I joined a couple of groups on Facebook specifically set up for people travelling to the area – this was a huge source of information to us and we got to see where people who were visiting were recommending along with hints and tips around things not to miss. From here, we knew which towns we wanted to visit around the lake and heard about a wine festival that was on in a nearby town while we were there as well as seeing some photos from things we loved the look of and knew we wanted to see them ourselves when we were there.
We always hire a car so the next thing I did was to Google ‘Cities near Lake Garda’ and found that Milan, Verona and Venice were within driving distance. I looked them up on Apple Maps and found out just how far they were and then compared them to the local train prices using the trainline app. That helped me to decide which cities we would drive to and which we would get the train to.
We decided to drive to Venice and train to Milan and Verona so I made sure that I knew the best place to park in Venice and knew the costs before we travelled.
I spent a bit of time researching each city we were visiting and looking up what were the must-see things in each place. I find blogs are great for this as they’re usually from the perspective of someone who has already been there and done it rather than just a list of recommendations. I had a list of places for each city before we left and for the most part, I’d managed to sort them into a little itinerary so we did them in a logical order rather than dotting about all over the place thanks to blogs and people sharing their experiences on the Facebook groups.
Another thing I did as part of my planning was to Google ‘Driving in Lake Garda’ which I like to do as there might be a few tips and tricks for driving and parking in certain areas. Things like areas where parking is difficult (the train station for example), what parking apps they use locally and if there’s any areas people have struggled with. We discovered that the drive down one side of the lake was a bit hair-raising due to the winding roads and tunnels in the mountains but the consensus was that it was well worth it if you dare drive it, which we did and it absolutely was.
Next up, I checked Trip Advisor and searched for the Top 10 attractions in Sirmione (where we stayed) and then Lake Garda as a whole. This is where I found out about a thermal spa that went straight to the top of my must do list. Knowing about it in advance meant that I could book one of the much coveted evening slots which are half the price but equally as brilliant. These sell out very quickly due to the limited number of tickets for each evening so we wouldn’t have been able to do this had we not booked in advance.
I don’t want you to think that I plan so much that a holiday is like a military operation as it’s not the case at all. I have the information to hand should we need it and I enjoy the planning so much that it makes the build up to the holiday all the more exciting to me.
I am super careful not to over plan and to not worry if we decide to change plans, as we often do – like when we decided to follow some random signs and discovered it was a beautiful waterfall. But I do like to know that if we’re going to go somewhere that we know where all the good stuff.
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