by Marla Jo Fisher / © 2015, The Orange County Register (Santa Ana, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Planning your own vacation is scary, but worth it.
I used my first Lonely Planet as a guide when my friend and I went to Oaxaca, Mexico. I’d never been anywhere in a foreign country that wasn’t a resort catering to Americans or escorted by a tour guide.
I was very anxious, indeed, as we got on the plane and flew south.
But we quickly realized that my Lonely Planet provided all the information we needed. It told us how to get a van from the airport into town. How to find a decent hotel. Good inexpensive restaurants. How to hire a taxi.
It wasn’t nearly as hard as I’d expected. It was so much fun wandering around on our own schedules—not the tour guide’s.
After that trip, buying a Lonely Planet guidebook became one of the rituals for any trip that I proposed to take. Then, I read it cover to cover, to get ideas of where to go and what to do.
Nowadays, you can buy electronic Lonely Planet guides for your iPad and Kindle, cutting down the amount of space they take up in your suitcase. Personally, I’m still old-fashioned and like to have a paper one to mark up.
And the other Lonely Planet guide that’s become indispensable to me is the Thorntree Forum. This is an online forum on the Lonely Planet website. It’s populated by thousands of obsessed travelers who are available to answer any sort of odd, esoteric question that maybe your guidebook can’t.
If you’re flexible, you can go to websites like Airfarewatchdog.com or FareCompare.com and sign up for airfare alerts to places that interest you. Then, if you get an email alert about a super-cheap fare, grab it instantly before it’s gone. I went to Alaska for $160 round-trip and Peru for $242 by snatching those rate deals when they became available.
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