Impromptu plans are the best. One such plan was just a month ago in early November when we went to Paris. The ETA from idealization to booking travel/accommodation was 30 minutes. Of course as much as one would believe in impromptu plans one has to realise these are the days when you are extremely lucky.Let me tell you the main reasons for success of an impromptu plan:1. The first thing is the most obvious one- a crazy person in your group to suggest an out of the box place to visit.2. Spotting a cheap travel option within the next few days (this is where your luck quotient speaks)3. Having some (little is enough) bucks in your bank account. You might have this for various reasons though, it doesn’t have to be for travel purposes.4. The last point is to rule out yourself and the above point and spend a part of this on your travel!As you can see it does involve a bit of craziness. You would wonder what is the point in spending all of it in travel and coming back to nothing? Well, be reasonable. My recent example would be where I pledged to survive in $200 for groceries and other expenses in the month of December. But when I spent $100 on an impromptu travel I can back to another hundred bucks. This is more than sufficient if I could just manage with buying groceries and cooking myself rather than spending them on pizzas. This is definitely doable. Just manage your money.It has been a month since I moved to America. My trip here is only for half a year and staying in Boston is very expensive. After visiting a handful of countries earlier this year while living in Europe, travelling in America would be the first thought in mind. However considering practical reasons, feasibility and financial condition, I didn’t keep my hopes up for seeing “many” places.One fine Wednesday evening I was talking to my friends back from the Netherlands who are also here with me in Boston about meeting up over the weekend for maybe some dinner or a roadtrip to some place close. Just to venture the area a bit. I have become obsessed with Google Maps as I do always when I move to a new place and started slowly zooming out of Boston to see what places exist in the surroundings. There were quite a few national parks, maybe we could go to an Aquarium or more conveniently we could also just stay home for the night and eat pizza. My slow zooming out process suddenly went wrong and I was almost seeing most parts of northern USA and Canada now. Thanks to the “save places” option in Google Maps (I have loads of them in my account), I happen to see Niagara Falls that seemed very close to Boston now because of the complete zoom-out. The crazy side of me started to Google for “weekend trips to Niagara from Boston”. And from then everything went exponentially up!- We became Niagara weirdos since all of us were immediately okay with making this trip happen.- We booked the trip in an hour within the suggestion being made.- In just two days from booking we were on a car to see Niagara Falls. My first roadtrip in the US.
- It was winter season so all the iconic touristic adventures were closed. Less crowd. Which means we had the incredible place to ourselves to walk around and take zillions of pictures.- We were on time to see the falls during sunset. It was a beautiful breathtaking view!
- We walked to the Luna island. By this time our hands were freezing making it so hard to move. We still took pictures.- We did not visit Canda, but we sure did see it.- The night fancy view of Niagara Falls was also amazing
- Learnt a bit of history around the Old Niagara Fort.
- Went to Corning Museum of Glass. Live demonstration of making a hard glass bowl was stunning. After which we saw numerous glass arts (40,000 of them they say). The skyline art certainly did catch my attention.
That was a wonderufl trip that could be made just in a weekend! Now going back to saving up money in groceries. Not because I made this trip but for the next one ;)
December 2015
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