Finding Things to do Part I - TripAdvisor

Despite the name, a road trip is not just about all of the time that you spend on the road (although that does cover a lot of time).  The question is, how do you find all of these attractions?

 It is also about all of the time that you stop and "do something".  That something can be anything from visiting a museum to going on a hike to taking in a ballgame to checking out the world's largest ball of twine (for the record, it's in Branson, MO).

As I noted in an earlier post, I often use our big mapbook to scan an area and look for attractions.  However, even my wonderful book only contains so much, and in an age of GPS I am not buying a new mapbook every year, and thus it is likely that some new attractions have sprung up as well.

In this post, I will focus on my first stop for planning a road trip - TripAdvisor.  If you are planning a road trip and have not familiarized yourself with this site, do so as soon as you can.  While the hotel and flight sections are useful, there are many sites that can help with that, and they all mostly feed off of the same information.  However, for finding attractions, TripAdvisor is tops.

How does it work?  Fairly simple.  Enter your location and then click on "things to do"(or do those steps in reverse).  You will have the option of choosing the type of attraction you are looking for, and if you are looking in a major city, you may have more ways of filtering your search.  Each attraction is listed with all major details and links to relevant websites, as well as user ratings on a scale of 1-5 and comments.  I have found that many of the people who offer comments take the job seriously and offer very detailed critiques and recommendations that have helped to guide my thinking about various venues and sites.  As I believe that we are all in this together, I have made many contributions to TripAdvisor as well (you can read all of my comments here).

My one critique of TripAdvisor is that it works best in telling you the attractions in or immediately near a city.  If you are willing to venture far outside of the city itself, TripAdvisor is not great at letting you know what exists out there.  But that is a minor detail.  This is a great site with more information than you need to find out all you need to know about attractions both major and minor.

Next time, we'll look at a couple of sites that focus on the out-of-the-way places that you might want to visit.