vacation planning

I'm planning a major vacation, or what counts as major by my standards, next month. This started as a convention trip, but I hanker to tootle around what's strange country to me while I'm there. And having made plane, car, and hotel reservations, I've been exploring the matter of what to do and see, and just as importantly what to eat, while I'm there. This involves checking out a whole host of tour books - I'm partial to Moon and Lonely Planet - from various libraries, jotting down notes about tempting things located where I'm going, and then checking everything online for accuracy and up-to-dateness. Detailed planning, with lots of options rather than a rigid schedule, whets the appetite for the trip.

There's two catches. One is that things closed on the one day of the week that I'll be there are a specialty everywhere. And also, some areas are better covered by tourist guides than others. I'm visiting four states on this trip, and I find that while there's plenty of tourist information on Texas and New Mexico, for Oklahoma and Kansas the material is more limited. I have some old AAA tourbooks, from back when they were still covering restaurants, and both states have entries in the sketchy but intermittently useful "Off the Beaten Path" guidebook series, which I was able to find at one cozy library. That helped.

Having made my lists of sites and restaurants, I then print out a series of maps from Google Maps of the various towns and small cities I'm visiting, and mark on them the locations of my sites. Bigger cities are more difficult to handle this way, but photocopies of urban area insets from the state maps, and of tourist districts from the tourbooks, serve as substitutes.

What am I seeing? I'm inclined to history museums, mostly - not the little local ones that collect miscellaneous junk, but serious explorations of the history of a region. And some scenery, so long as I don't have to take a hike to see it, since long walks are beyond me now. And as for eating, I follow the way of the Trillin, which is to look for solid but not fancy expressions of the local cuisine. In Texas and Oklahoma that means steakhouses and barbecue, and in New Mexico lots of green chile. Also, Louisiana cuisine - my favorite US regional - leaks over as far as central Texas, so I'm noting that as well. There's lots of Mexican and Tex-Mex places too, and I'm noting those for when there's nothing else or when I simply want a change, but since those are cuisines well-supplied at home, I'm not prioritizing it for the trip.

Now to turn my attention to preparing to pack, and shopping for anything I'll need.