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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I don't know (though I admittedly travel quite a bit, albeit mostly for business). It's one thing to drop into a place with no real expectations and spend the time to really get to know it. That can take a lot of time.

But you can also approach a place with an attitude that there are a couple places/activities you really want to see/do/eat but let the rest develop more organically. It's easier once you've checked the "must-dos" off your list admittedly. There are a number of places I enjoy returning to in part because there's nothing I feel I must do. But if I spend a trip just flitting from attraction to attraction and don't spend time just wandering around, I feel that's a miss.

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If you only ever expect to get to go to London once in your life, you're going to be very busy trying to see everything in the week you have.

I know a number of people who travel rarely, as they can't often afford major trips. Their trips frequently include a relatively large number of must-do items, because they've spent a lot of time planning the three or five or seven days they can afford halfway around the world.

And this is before getting into what the obsessive planners I know do when on vacation!

That's certainly fair. I'm in London 2 or 3 times a year and usually try to hit something new if I have personal time. But I don't need to hit the British Museum on a given trip. London's probably something of an extreme because there are so many must-dos. But I think it's also fair to agree with the general sentiment that traveling shouldn't be exclusively about a check list. (If it's Tuesday it must be Belgium.)

Of course, it you're spending a little time in a place for what might be the only time there are probably one or two things you sorta have to see. But you should mostly avoid (IMO) just checking off sites.

> If you only ever expect to get to go to London once in your life, you're going to be very busy trying to see everything in the week you have.

The trap is, of course, that it's monumentally stupid to cram "seeing London" into the timeframe of one week. The bigger the city, the longer the time it takes to properly take it in. Otherwise your travel experience is a 200 km/h carousel ride: what can you even retain and process, at that speed?

What's the difference between seeing the Milan Dome in-person for a brief 20 minutes (because you have a laundry list of stuff to do) -- and seeing it in pictures? Not much, in my opinion.

Personally, I'd rather see only 1/5 of the "objectives" available to me, if the ones I DO end up visiting stay in my memory.

It's easier once you've checked the "must-dos" off your list admittedly.

Absolutely. I’ve been visiting Scotland since childhood (family is Scottish) and the last few trips have been fantastic precisely because I’ve seen the must-sees (as has my wife, who has now visited twice) and can now just drive around and take in the beauty.

And now that we’ve visited several other countries, we seem to have found a balance between “see all the things” and “relax and smell the roses”.

But, admittedly, we have the budget to travel internationally once a year or more.

It doesn't even have to be somewhere completely foreign or far away. Getting out of LA just a few hours out to other parts of CA, whether the rugged coast, wineries, eastern Sierras or sparse Mojave for a few days can help one decompress. I know I'm looking forward to my the week I'm taking off in December no matter whether it's a 2 hr drive or flight to Mexico.

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