Javelin wrote:That was my favourite way to travel before I got married... i'd just show up in places that interested me. Wifey would be horrified if I ever tried to take her on a trip like that. I never really flew anywhere though. always driving. Now I HAVE to tavel for work .. and I hate it. I spent a week in Chicago earlier this month and never had a chance to get out to take pictures.
I usually have no particular plans or itinerary when I travel. Sometimes I even only have a one-way plane ticket so that I have even more flexibility. I love road trips too. In 1999 we set off on a 9-week road trip throughout the western U.S. We visited pretty much all the national parks and many national monuments, sometimes tent camping, sometimes staying in motels. We stayed off of the interstate highways as much as possible and took lots of backroads visiting small towns, etc. In those 9 weeks we drove 12,500 miles/20,000 kilometers -- my recollection is that gasoline was about $1/gallon then.

We have done many road trips of several weeks, but that was the longest.
In a previous life I worked in the computer industry for about 20 years and during the 1980s and 1990s I did a fair amount of business travel. I usually tried to arrive a couple of days early and then after the business stay a couple more days before heading home. That way I generally had 3-4 free days. When I lived in Silicon Valley that is what I did on trips to Boston, Seattle, New York City, Chicago, Austin, Nashua, etc. On a business trip to the south of France in 1994 I arrived 2 days early and then after the week long meeting was over I traveled in Italy for 4 weeks.