Day and I consider ourselves pretty seasoned travelers. In the past we avoided touristy activities because, hey, they are for tourists and we are "world travelers." The more you travel, the more you learn, and the first thing we learned, we are still babies when it comes to "world traveling." The other thing we learned, we like doing the touristy things, we just don't like hordes of tourists.
TripAdvisor is a great website for planning your trip, we use it prior to our trip and while we are on our trip, (as a matter of fact, TripAdvisor and smart phones are essential for travel and worthy of a post themselves) but that is for another day. With TripAdvisor, we decide where we want to stay, what we want to do, and where and what to eat. People review everything, but take the reviews with a "grain of salt." You can get a pretty good idea of let's say a hotel, by their overall star rating, an average of all the individual reviews and then peruse through the reviews. We watch for many things, such as, the number of people who have reviewed the hotel. Doesn't mean much if only 5 people have reviewed a place, or maybe it does, why does it have only 5 reviews? We also pay attention to how many reviews a person has posted. What I mean is, if you saw that I reviewed something, you could click on my profile and see who I am, where I am from, how many reviews I have posted and, click on my previous posts. Why is this important, well some people like to bitch. If you see someone has nothing better to do than write hundreds of reviews on TripAdvisor and all they do is bitch, well who cares what they think. I also love the ones that start with, "my wife and I have traveled all over the world." They wanna brag and hear themselves bloviate.
Also, pay attention to where people are from, different cultures and people expect different things. Americans and Europeans are completely different, for instance, bathrooms, more specifically, the showers. My shower is 5 ft. × 5 ft, has a seat in it, plenty of shelves and two shower heads, that's usually not the case in Europe. Showers are usually quite small and often it's a bathtub with the shower head on the hose. That's just the way it is. An American might complain about the hotel's breakfast, as a matter of fact, they often do.
An American breakfast is usually the hot stuff: eggs, omelets, pancakes, sausage and home fries, the list goes on and on. A European breakfast leans towards the cold dishes: yogurts, cereals, fresh fruit and vegetables. They put out some hot stuff, but...it's not the best. Now surely you can complain if the yogurt has mold on it, but you can't complain that there is no pancakes, I have never seen a pancake in Europe. So keep in mind who is writing the reviews. I just read a review about the "Gap of Dunloe" in Killarney. The review was written by some guy's mommy, about what a terrible time this adult guy had on this tour, really? We went on it and it was fantastic, which brings us to "tours."
More specifically "walking tours," but I promised to keep my posts short, so I am stopping here with (pt.1) of Travel, TripAdvisor, Walking Tours, and...the President of Ireland. Haha, I hope that is enough of a teaser to bring you back for part 2.
Luv ya
Curly
P.S. if you are reading my blog, please take a moment to comment, I would enjoy some feedback.
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