Package tours are popular. They take the stress out of travel. You don’t have to worry about finding a hotel each night. You don’t have to worry about finding somewhere with familiar food and English menus. There is always English speaking guide and comfortable transportation.
Take away the tour and things are even simpler. Spend a week or two in a warm climate, one resort, one hotel with one beach, a few restaurants with English speaking service. There is no need to think at all for the duration of your stay. Just relax.
That may be the ideal holiday for some people and that is presumably why such packages are popular. However, there are much more interesting and memorable alternatives. Travel is a great way to broaden your horizons and add to your life experiences. There are so many different forms and degrees of adventure. For example, it is interesting to ponder how many people have seen more than a tenth of their home country. The answer is very few. So, if you have some holiday time coming up, consider taking a tour of your own country, is there anything you have never seen that you wanted to? In Britain, for example, there are plenty of interesting and beautiful places to visit.
- Outstanding natural beauty in Wales and the West Country
- Historical interest in York
- Mountains of the Scottish Highlands
- The Lake District or the Peak District
- Places such as Cheddar Gorge
Getting There is Easy
If you have a car then all you need is a road map to visit places within driving distance where you have never yet been. If you want to go a bit further afield, a website such as www.travelrepublic.co.uk makes it very easy to find and book cheap flights and accommodation.
There are lots of small airports all over this planet, except Antarctica, so you can quite easily and quite quickly get to very many parts of the world. You might alternatively find that a train or a coach is the easiest way to get wherever you want to go. You do not need to be brave or very adventurous to travel, and that is especially so within the UK.
Outstanding Natural Beauty
There are 46 areas in various parts of Britain that have been designated as Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. There is a website, aonb.org.uk, which lists them all and gives some information about them. Devon and Cornwall are two fine examples of outstandingly beautiful Britain. Exmoor is a wonderful place to go walking, cycling, picnicking or pub lunching. It is a great location for a family outing with a kite, a football or a Frisbee.
The abundance of wind from the Atlantic makes it especially suitable for kite flying. Wherever you are in Britain you are probably not very far from a place of great beauty or a town of great historical and cultural interest. There are lots of castles across the British Isles. Some of them are little more than ruins and even these are of interest to historians. But many of them are well preserved and maintained. The buildings themselves are often impressive, of architectural interest and sometimes surrounded by very pretty grounds. These are also wonderful places for picnics. Small towns or villages are much more interesting than big cities, and also much more accessible.
People who live in villages which are not tourist destinations are generally glad to receive visitors. Such places are closely knit communities with a sense of identity, unlike the anonymous and antisocial cities where so many of us live. Visit a few small villages, whether they are in England, Scotland or Thailand. Such visits are eye opening and spiritually satisfying. In southern Europe there are thousands of little villages where tourists rarely venture. These places are home to ancient communities and people who will welcome visitors with more than a professional service smile.
If you go to a village which is part of the tourist trail and visited by thousands every year, the people in the service industries will welcome your money but the people who simply live there will probably be weary of seeing and hearing so many people with so many cameras.
This article was written by Ted Hunter. Ted is a keen blogger and enjoys writing about a wide range of topics. He frequently contributes articles and reviews like Travel Republic review.
Sometimes you need to stay at resorts or near touristy places but travel in villages and far out places are the best.