Guide Books - Good & Bad

There comes a time in every trip prep where you are just done with the planning.  Especially with a convoluted trip like this with multiple countries over two months.  There is, necessarily, at least one intensive stage where you have to lock down the logistics of coming and going (and who is coming and going - still not entirely settled...).  By now, I have booked (and paid!) for flights over to Europe and back from Asia and the train segments leading from Estonia to China. But, in order to do that I have spent weeks pouring over guide books to figure out potential routes and exactly how many days to spend in each town and city we were potentially passing through.  I do hate that we are booking the train tickets in advance but given it is high season and the must popular route through Russia, we really don't have a choice. And I want to know if I really want to spend 7 days in St. Petersburg and 4 in Moscow or vice versa.  It is like a puzzle where we have to fit all the places we want to visit into the time frame we have and not feel squished.  I can look on line and I can read blogs but there is nothing like a guidebook with their "top ten highlights" and "4 day Itineraries" and handy maps to really give you the lowdown on what there is to do and see in each city. And since, of course, we can't see everything, it is the quickest way of slicing and dicing our itinerary. Sometimes we make decisions based on those lovely words "most tourists don't stop here".  We are taking the southern loop of the Trans Siberian railway instead of the northern one for just that reason.  And because it means we can stop at Kazan - the capital of Tatarshan, a sovereign republic in the Russian Federation.  Love the idea of visiting a "Stan" while not even leaving Russia.

But, I now have "guidebook enteritis".  I've read so much about where we are going I no longer want to go there. I feel like I've already been there! Too much information.  My husband never reads guidebooks until he has left the place they are covering.  He says he can't understand them until he has seen what they are talking about. I'm not quite at the point of throwing away all guidebooks but I am going to take a rest for a while and enjoy living in the present instead of planning for the future.  Spring has just arrived in our neck of the woods and it is pretty glorious indeed. I could imagine lots of people wanting to come visit here and take a break just admiring these kinds of spring blossoms.