Too often, modern museums and attractions treat the masses with impersonal suspicion. To avoid losing your attention at any given moment they steer you, corral you, and make decisions for you about where to go, what to like and how to have a good time. And they'll take $12.50 for it, thank you.
We prefer the places that trust you to function without hand-holding and flashy signs. We love seeking out the places fanatics with obscure hobbies go on pilgrimages. You make your own fun. You find interests you didn't know you had. These places don't tell you what to do and what to think, just to do and think.
This is not to say that all big attractions should be avoided (at some point, you just have to see the British Museum), but perhaps travelers would do well to ask themselves, "Wouldn't it be fun to go somewhere everyone else hasn't?"
If you set out with a guidebook's checklist of "important" things to see, it is certainly satisfying to check off item after item. But you will just go home with a filled-in checklist and a bag full of souvenirs. Travel can be so much more meaningful. Especially if you find something that resonates with you, and build your trip around that. Your trip can have a theme --chocolate, castles, family history, religious exploration, literature-- anything that you personally find meaningful. This will help you build an itinerary that actually means something to you as well as provide for the possibility of profound experience.
Take on your adventure as a pilgrimage: you are going for a reason, in search of something.
Someone once asked one of our college mentors how he could afford to travel somewhere new and exotic every summer. He replied, "I don't remodel the bathroom." Turns out you don't have to be rich to go anywhere -- it's really just a matter of priorities.
Cheaper travel forces you to really experience a place. 5-Star hotels and expensive tour buses are great if your goal is sight-seeing. But if your goal is to experience a place, they only isolate you from what's real.
Pack your own lunch (if your hotel includes breakfast, do it then). Shop at the grocery store (it's an interesting cultural experience, anyway -- standard British sandwich fillers will surprise you). Eat at the local pubs. Find the bargains. Do the free stuff. And for heaven's sake, put down that commemorative collector's coin! (Unless, of course, coins are the reason for your pilgrimage.)
Be There, Don't Just See There.
It is so tempting to race around, squeezing in as much sight-seeing as possible into a single day. But after about three days, it's exhausting, and even stuff that should be really impressive starts to lose its luster. Similarly, bouncing from city to city can start to drain a person, especially if you're not a city person in the first place. Planning an itinerary is an art, really -- try to balance "big" stuff and "little" stuff, hectic and relaxed, city and countryside.
Consider spending time in a place no one has heard of. It is certainly understandable that part of the pleasure of travel is that you can go home and say, "I spent a week in London" and have everyone sigh in jealousy. Naturally that is part of the draw. If you go home and say, "I spent a week in Wellesbourne," the response is "never heard of it", and a blank stare. Well, that's the way it must be, then. Your trip was never about them, anyway.
Give yourself time to sit and absorb, to observe and think. Visit a country park and write in a journal or sketch. Soak up the real place. Resist the temptation to race around checking things off your list, and you may find yourself having more profound experiences.
The irony of guidebooks that profess to send you "off the beaten track" is that they are mass-produced, and the spots they pick are instantly on the beaten track. Rick Steves, for example, started his guidebook career professing to show readers "Europe through the Back Door", but his travel empire is so massive that his readers now steamroller any place he writes about. The back door became the front door. So if you're really going to take the back door, you have to find it yourself.
We've spent some time searching for Britain's back doors. And while we aren't advocating building a whole itinerary around the small, the weird, and the unknown attractions, we hope to inspire travelers to think twice about how and where they go -- and hope that a few of those hoards of tourists will discover the joys of making travel a more personal, more meaningful pilgrimage.
