MAKING THE BEST OF A BAD DESTINATION

MAKING THE BEST OF A BAD DESTINATION

Some places turn out to be a mistake.  Your best friend may have loved it, but it just doesn't work for your family.  Despite the amount of helpful travel information, no family can really know whether they'll like a place until they go there.  Most will turn out to be wonderful.  A few won't.  One of the reasons is that nearly all travel material is oriented to either the tourist who wants to know where to shop, where to dine and how to take a tour, or to the backpacking college crowds who are looking for action hiking  and where the action is.  Family adventuring lies somewhere in the middle between tourist hot-spots and singles hand-outs.  As travel material rarely deals with adventuring families (a deficiency we're presently working on), much of where you choose to go will be guesswork.

 

If you have arrived somewhere, given it a chance to grow on you and finally realized you've made a mistake, what can you do?

Look at the funny side of the situation-nearly every bad moment in adventure travel has its humorous side.  It's like taking your children to the Ice Capades.  You can dread the whole experience and have a miserable time or you can laugh yourself silly.  Children will simply follow your lead. If you see the funny side, they will, too.

Find something fun and adventurous to do.  There's always something adventurous you can do, even in the most unlikely circumstances.  Try exploring the surrounding area.  Few tourists venture beyond the town or city limits.  We did some of our best hiking in Colorado  outside a village that seemed to be largely under construction, populated by unfriendly entrepreneurs and filled with young tourists ready to party.  Another time we found ourselves stranded on an island in a town that turned out to be quite dreary and not at all what we were looking for.  We rented two derelict one-speed bicycles for a dollar apiece, sat each child on a backrack and biked all over the island.  The whole experience was a wild adventure, culminating in a flat tire on a remote road and a hitched ride in the back of a pick-up.  This is the stuff that adventuring is made of, those memorable happenings when you least expect them.

Know when to leave. Don't be afraid to leave somewhere you don't like, even at the risk of losing money.  It's better to forfeit a few hundred dollars than the whole trip.  Being able to make your own decisions and change plans when you want to is one of the advantages of adventure travel.  There's nothing locking you into a certain place or situation except your own actions.

The most drastic exit we ever performed was early in our family adventuring career, when we flew to Aspen  for a three-week trip with six-month-old Tristan and Colin.  On the advice of an acquaintance, we booked into a place that turned out to be miles from the nearest town  and store.   As the only other places to stay in the area were way out of our price range, we left Aspen  and flew back to Eagle  for a fabulous three weeks of camping. Sure, we wasted the flight money, but we didn't waste the whole trip and the lesson learned has helped us avoid similar mistakes again.

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