Travel Logistics. Making plans and preparations on your own. (Part 1.)

So you've been thinking about traveling, visiting some of the places you've always yearned to explore. You'd like to try something a little different this time, to break away from the usual all inclusive cruise or the hum-drum hotel experience, but the fear of the unknown is holding you back. "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"-HP Lovecraft

Logistics. The careful organization of a complicated activity so that it happens in a successful manner. This is the part of travel preparation that can be daunting. It's what leads people to choose a planned tour or book a standard hotel room. It's the difference between taking a shore excursion off a cruise ship and driving a rented fiat down the Amalfi Coast. On one hand you have everything prearranged for you, with all of the nit-picky little details worked out in advance, a calming homogenized experience. On the other, you deal with personally procuring a vehicle in a town where no one speaks your language and then driving said vehicle down a twisty narrow road with five hundred foot drops to the sea. A gritty, sometimes harrowing experience. Ah, the difference between travel and adventure.

Now we'd be the first to confess that we are not the type of travelers who hitchhike to Machu Picchu and then hang glide down to the village below in time to have a stylized tattoo of Pachamama rendered on our calf by a local Shaman. We're not that kind of adventurers.

Off the beaten path-Venice

But we do like to get off the beaten path once in awhile, and we try to experience the places we travel to in a little bit more intimate way, and to do that it takes forward thinking, planning...logistics.

So let's look into some ways you might be able to make your next trip into a little less of a vacation and a little more of an adventure.

Airbnb, Homeaway , Flipkey and VRBO:
These are but a handful of the short term rental sites available to you. With all of the different rentals available now in every part of the world it's an exciting way to break free from the standard Double Tree by Hilton room that looks and feels the same no matter what part of the world you find yourself. Renting a room or a house from a private party half way across the world takes a bit of planning and screening, but most of these sites are well equipped to guide you through the myriad of choices available using customer ratings, detailed descriptions and photos. In our travels we have stayed on a one hundred acre copra farm on Vanua Levu in the Fijian Islands, a stone cottage sitting on top of a four hundred foot bluff in Saint-Cirq-Lapope, France, a house with a dock and pool on Palm Island in Florida, a houseboat in Amsterdam, a cabin in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, an apartment over a canal in Venice and a half timbered home off a cobbled street in Dinan, France.

Siga Siga Plantation, Vanua Levu, Fiji

Patio of the stone cottage in Saint-Cirq-Lapope, France

Plantation Cottage, Maui, Hawaiian Islands

View from our 19th century Venice Apartment rental along the Rio di San Girolamo

Half Timbered frame House rental Dinan, France

Gearhart Cabin, Oregon Coast

Palm Island, Florida

17th Century Cottage in Saint-Cirq-Lapope, France

These are just a few of the places we've found to stay during our travels, and the great thing about them was they are almost always less expensive than booking a room in a standard hotel. On top of that they are usually self catering, meaning they have kitchen facilities. This allows you to live a little more like a local, be able to take advantage of the local markets, and not always having to rely on restaurants for your meals.