Most itineraries fail on pace, not on choice

The trips people regret are rarely the ones with the wrong places on the list. They are the ones with the right places in the wrong order, at the wrong speed.

Ask someone what went wrong with a disappointing trip and they will usually describe a place. They will say the town was overrated, or the coast was busy, or the drive was too long. Look at the plan and the place is almost never the problem. The problem is that it was given a day and a half when it needed three, or three when it needed one.

Pacing errors compound. A transfer that runs two hours over does not cost two hours; it costs the evening, the early start that was supposed to follow it, and the appetite for the next day's drive. By the third slip the plan is no longer a plan, it is a schedule being survived.

The fix is unglamorous. Count the moves rather than the days: every change of base costs roughly half a day in packing, transfer and re-orientation, whatever the map says. A ten-day trip with four bases is not a ten-day trip; it is eight days of travel with two days of moving distributed through it.

Then decide, before anything is booked, which two or three days of the trip are the ones you will remember. Protect those. Everything else can flex around them, and usually should.


Basis for this note. Written from planning practice and publicly verifiable sources. Not a first-person trip report.

General planning method; not specific to one destination.

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