A Digression on Logistics

Mary Joy complains that I go into too much detail. Rick Steves says that in researching his guidebooks he makes all the mistakes, so that we don't have to. We like Lonely Planet guidebooks for their breadth of coverage, good restaurant advice and maps (Rick Steves's maps look hand-drawn and are sometimes hard to read). Steves excels at in-depth coverage of the (relatively few) places he writes about, as well as in details of the nuts and bolts of getting from point A to point B and getting done what you want to do once you get there (his restaurant recommendations have sometimes been iffy). Independent travel requires a great deal of such logistical planning. Doing such planning is the sort of intricate puzzle that I enjoy. Actually putting your planning into execution, however, can be stressful. In fact, the trips that I've enjoyed the most have tended to be the ones requiring the least responsibility.

On a bus tour or a cruise, all you have to do is show up with your pants on (though, on one occasion, which I've probably mentioned before and will not retell here, I didn't even manage to do that). This is more relaxing than being your own tour director, and you meet a lot of interesting people on tours, but it is pricier and you are stuck with the tour's itinerary and schedule. You also don't have the feeling of accomplishment and confidence in your own capability that results from managing a complicated itinerary. We did a tour in China and will do one in India, and we did one when we traveled to Spain and Portugal with my parents and brother and sister-in-law in 2005. Otherwise, I've been the tour director on our travels.

In any case, I feel a responsibility to tell as exactly as possible, if only for our future reference, how we managed to navigate through the shoals of these very foreign waters without running aground. There is always a certain degree of culture shock, even in a country like Switzerland, where I've been nine or ten times, or England, where we are, as George Bernard Shaw put it, two nations divided by the same language. When we travel we are strangers in a strange land, and can never take anything absolutely for granted.