One of my favorite parts about traveling is embracing the unknown. Meeting new people, engaging in new cultures, exploring new places — I find it all so fascinating. However, being the Type-A person I am, my husband and I spent a lot of time planning and researching each city we would visit before heading off on our trip.
For example, did you know you can create your own Google Maps and pin places you want to visit? This was a game-changer for our trip and saved us so much time. By organizing our "must sees" beforehand, we dove head first into exploring as soon as we arrived at each destination. Since we sometimes only had one or two days to explore certain cities, having these maps also helped us make the most of our time by knowing which places were closest together.
If you have the Google Maps app on your smartphone, you can also download an offline map for each city you visit. Because we did not have an international phone plan while abroad, we made sure that when we did come across WiFi, we downloaded copies of each map, which helped to navigate our way around while not wasting time being lost.
By organizing as much as possible beforehand, this made embracing the unknown much less intimidating and a whole lot more exhilarating.
