By Mark W, May 08, 2008 at 08:57 PM

Let’s pretend you’re on vacation in London with your family. You’ve spent the last several months planning this trip and saved up for it even longer. The day is all planned out: morning at the British Museum (I’d love to see the Hadrian exhibit), take the tube to Westminster station (the kids love “Minding the Gap”), check out Westminster Abby, walk across the River Thames for a ride on the London Eye before hopping back on the tube for some dinner plans across town. A perfectly planned day, except in the middle of your London Eye ride, it stops and you’re stuck there for over an hour trying to get your kids to urinate into a plastic bag. There goes dinner and the rest of your plans for that day.

For every perfectly planned day, I’m willing to bet there’s a ruined day. Those of you with kids know the first problem: there’s no way the kids will be able to keep up that schedule (depending on how young they are, of course). Kids get sensory overload and need down time to process everything they’ve seen and learned so far. But even for just adults, who’s ever planned a packed vacation only to be held up at one place or another. Not to mention an occasional delay on the subway, no matter what city you’re in.

Let’s go back into pretend land again for a moment. Pretend you’ve woken up on your London vacation, looking out onto a quant park while the kids are getting ready for the day. They’re excited ready to go. You pull out a small bag filled with folded up pieces of paper. The kids rotate pulling out one piece of paper, on which is written a destination or attraction to see until you have five or six. From those, one of the kids picks one and on that paper is written where you’ll visit first. Off you go to enjoy that attraction. When you’re done, another random choice and off you go. You’ve bought full day tube passes, right?

So what’s the difference between the two? Well, with the second, I’m not tied into a schedule. I don’t need Outlook to plan my vacation. It’s also less stressful. Consider, if I spend all day at the first attraction, so be it. The others go back into the bag when we get back to the hotel. What if you complete all the ones you picked that day? Spend the evening walking the neighborhood you ended up in. Guess what, there are some great little shops located away from the main tourist strips.

When I was in Paris last time, I casually walked from Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tower along the Seine River. It was a stunningly beautiful day and I almost fell for the “lost 18k gold ring” con (it’s amazing what the weather can do to your senses). My schedule for that day was that our group was meeting at the tower at 7:00 p.m. for our ride to the top. That’s all I had planned. No rushing from site to site. Just casually make my way there.

I stopped at a restaurant where the waiter spoke no English. There were only two things on the menu I recognized: Pasta Bolognese and Beef Tartare. Sorry, I have an affinity with having my beef taste the flame for a while before I’ll eat it. I continued my walk, I got there a couple of hours ahead of time, so I spent the time taking photographs, hanging out on the lawn watching people and taking a series of good (not great, I didn’t have a tripod, grrr!) shots of the Eiffel Tower transitioning from day to dusk.

If I had a girlfriend at the time, I know we would have stopped at a street market to buy some bread, meats and cheese and just made sandwiches sitting in the shadow of the tower. Ahh, romance! Trust me, I know. Many of the people around me were doing just that and making out afterwards (sigh!).

So where do you get great ideas to write on those sheets of paper? Here of course!

There was a mini-review of this site on another site and the writer commented he didn’t understand what the site had to do with traveling off the cuff. Here’s how I respond:

There are hundreds, thousands of people out there blogging about their travel experiences in London, Paris, Russia, Africa, South America, and Idaho. As this site develops with more and more users submitting great travel stories and blogs they read out there, we’ll have a huge collection of ideas for you on your next trip. As those stories are upgraded by other readers, the most popular, most interesting stories make it to the front page.

I’ve got additional plans for the site, but it’s always one little step at a time.

So think about it, if your vacation requires Outlook or a blackberry to plan your day, then you’re not traveling off the cuff. Release the shackles of work and enjoy your vacation. Leave the cuffs at home.