travel, living locations

[wispfox]

I often wonder what it is that other people look for when traveling, beyond visiting specific people. Same as far as where people choose to live. So! I ask y'all what you think.

When you are traveling, especially if it involves returning to a place you've visited before, what makes your decision on where to go? I'd rather avoid answers which are specific to people instead of location, because people is already why I travel most of the time. I want other answers. I want to know where to go, why to go, and what to do when there. Outdoors and indoors, places to eat and places to visit, places to feed my mind, my ears, or my eyes. Sell your favorite places to visit to me!

Similarly, if you like where you live, or somewhere that you have lived in the past, why? If the answer is specific people, that's fine, but I want to know more than that. Is it access to specific social groups? Activities like museums or parks or forests? Safe neighborhoods? What?

Comments

[australian-joe.livejournal.com]

I'm not much help to you here - my travel is either to see people, so I go where the people are, or for work, so I go where the work is.

It's very rare that I travel for pleasure not based on people. The few times this has happened in the last five years have been more or less at the instigation of local partners, to whom I (of course) handed most of the planning.

Mostly our decisions were made based on cost, ease of travel (with none of us driving), and some specific attractions like scenery, adventures, etc.

K & I took a few days in New Zealand piggybacked on an academic conference she was attending, and we did things like a helicopter ride up to a glacier where we tromped around on the ice for a few hours, a cross-country scenic train ride, etc.

I've done similar things with Z where we had a bus tour through a beautiful section of winding coastal roads I wanted to show her, and stayed overnight in a silly little country town. We also more recently did a wine tour combined with a country bed & breakfast which was good.

Many years ago I had a driving trip with a then-partner and we drove wherever we felt like down the West Coast, stopped where we felt like stopping, side trips when we felt like it, and so on. That was pretty good.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

some specific attractions like scenery, adventures, etc.

See, that's the kind of things I want to know, and generally _don't_ know. So, you _are_ some help. :) (So there! ;)

had a driving trip with a then-partner and we drove wherever we felt like down the West Coast, stopped where we felt like stopping, side trips when we felt like it, and so on. That was pretty good.

That sounds a _lot_ like my eventual plans to wander around the US (http://www.livejournal.com/users/wispfox/111818.html). Hopefully _with_ other people, of course, but we shall see where my life is when I finally get around to that.

Was talking to weegoddess last night about this, actually - I tend to think that I don't have long-term plans, but then I remember that right this very moment I:

plan to visit wolfieboy when I have a better sense of what's going on in Aug and Sept, want to try to meet bridgetester, want to visit shadesong again, want to come visit you, want to travel around the US after I pay off school loans and save up enough, want to do massage school, and then perhaps try to figure out a way to combine my interest in energy work, massage, and picking through people's brains (when they are cooperating with it).

And I claim I have no plans. Sheesh! And that's not even including all the various cons and con-like things I intend to do! (baitcon, bicamp, falconridge, arisia, altpolycon, etc)

I should post that somewhere, so I don't forget. Perhaps something similar to my shorter-term plan list... *thinks*