What’s your travel style? Are you itinerary and schedule driven, needing to have every step mapped out in advance or are you content to arrive without a plan and let happenstance be your guide?

An interesting prompt today. I couldn’t let it pass, being the Ambitious Drifter. When I thought about it, I was struck by how meticulously I’d planned various holidays and how I’d then moved countries several times, without very much thought at all.  I headed off to Belgium for a job without any real idea of where I was going. It seemed a lot more exotic than Australia and I knew it was sort of next to France. Similarly, I fetched up in Amsterdam and The Hague, because the work was there.

The internet makes it easy to plan holidays. Hotels and flights can be booked well in advance. Timetables can be downloaded, or simply bookmarked on your fairly smart phone. My moderately clever phone will even show me a map and tell me where, approximately, I am. Nothing left to chance, but I still get lost. It’s quite annoying when your middling intelligence phone tells you you’re in the middle of Nice. Yep, I know that. Where’s the bleedin’ bus stop?  It can also be a nuisance having too much information. For every great museum you catch, there’ll be three you have to miss.

Given a few years worth of tourist wandering, I now consider myself a ‘traveller’, not a tourist. There’s exceptions. I’m certainly still a tourist in Japan. I have my tourist camera, that’s big and clunky and hangs around my neck. I’ve also got my traveller camera, pocket sized, it even goes shopping with me. Mind you, the little one has more megapixels than the big one.

I’m a happy wanderer, still always keen to see what’s around the next corner. The photos are from Australia, Belgium, France and Japan.  I’m not sure now which seems the most exotic.