planning for a trip

For months, I have been preparing for our August trip to Sweden. For the most part, preparing for any trip starts with scouring travel guides. We tend not to schlep these doorstoppers on our trip, preferring to cull all the information we gather and create our own more usable document that incorporates sights and restaurants with hotel, flight, and car rental reservations. Also, I have yet to find a publisher that combines the meaty text of Rough Guides or Lonely Planet with the glossy, “I want to go to there” pics of the Eyewitness Guides. So, with some of our recent trips, I have started checking out travel guides from the library.

The first step was picking up travel guides, so I checked out the two that the library branch had on the day I visited—Rough Guide and Frommers. Both proved to be relatively useless. They had the same sort of information, beginning with the physical description of Visby (a walled Medieval city and I’ve often wondered why we need travel guides, visiting a walled Medieval city is all-inclusive but I need to know that there is more than Medieval week activities to do in this city).

In Stockholm, John and I will re-visit favorite sights…the ones that we said we would one day take our kids to see. Vasa, food halls, royal palace with armory, St. George slaying the Dragon. But we only have one day to overcome jetlag and hit these sights before we head to Visby for Medieval Week.

The internet is such a rich place to research a trip and must be changing the face of travel in unexpected ways. Keyword searches for Visby yielded an official site for the town, as well as one for medieval week. Wikipedia has historical, geographical, and meteorological information that is similar to printed travel guides. Blogs are also helpful as they contain uncensored suggestions of “must-dos” and “avoids,” as well as photos to pique the travelers interest.

Other things we do to prepare for a trip include the following:
~ eat the foods
just the one’s we’re familiar with…to whet our literal and figurative appetites. we need to leave ourselves open to discovering new things. salmon, herring, Jansson’s, Engebretsen’s
~ immerse yourself in culture
for Sweden, we’ve listened to music (ABBA, Hives)
~ read some books
aside from travel guides, these often include history, culinary essays and cookbooks, travel essays, memoirs, and fiction
~ brush up on how to say “where is the bathroom”