Side Trip Guy | travel experience | head in research

I used to travel quite a bit with a good friend whom I chided for being the über-Itinerarian. He knew precisely which restaurant to go to at precisely which time on precisely which night of the week. After dinner, he knew precisely at which bar he would be drinking and which drink he would order when he got there. It struck me, watching him bury his head in research, that he was draining the life from his travel experience.

Then I noticed something. He went to better places than I did.

So I tried my hand at itinerizing. Lightly at first. Getting the name of a good hotel, finding out about an interesting nightclub. Before I knew it, it became … this: the precision-timed, categorized, subcategorized, color-coded taskmaster before me.

But there is something I don't know. Did I consciously decide to become an Itinerarian or, being at heart a Mr. Side Trip Guy, did it just sort of happen?

Whatever the case, I have embraced my new orderly identity with the same zest that animated my old shambling role. I tell myself that this tyranny of color-coded times and places actually liberates me.

I can play my visits like jazz. I have a structure now, I know where I am going. But within that structure, I can improvise. It is true improvisation, a sense of simultaneously playing within the boundaries while at the same time enlarging­ the musical landscape. It isn't just meandering, going hither and yon, making sound, perhaps, but not music.

With an itinerary, I can choose in advance to do something, then do it, rather than think about it when I get there and, well, not do it. Doing, we know, is better than not doing.

Of course, the true Mr. Side Trip Guy would say it depends on what the definition of "not doing" is. For example, what if you sip wine at a cafe while watching the clouds and the people pass by? What if you enter into a conversation and soak in the atmosphere of a place you have never been until it feels almost - for a fleeting second anyway - as if you are not a tourist but instead some guy who lives there and happens to have the day off? Is that not doing? And if it is, is that okay? Maybe that is what they call free jazz.