Travel Broadens the Scope for Disaster

I dislike making plans.  Part of the reason is making plans is work which is an immediate disincentive to someone as lazy as myself.  However the main reason I dislike making plans is because my plans rarely work.  Frequently the only purpose my plans serve is to provide a retrospective benchmark to enable me to determine how widely reality diverged from intention.  The result of this is when I do make plans they tend to be very simple and overengineered to the point of insanity.

If I need to be at a certain place at a certain time I will arrange to get there two hours earlier.  What this means is I actually arrive two hours earlier.  On the occasions when I give myself a ten minute buffer I tend to arrive two hours late.  The apollo programme put men on the moon with less of a safety margin than I build into a simple trip overseas.  In my defence I would like to point out that the apollo astronauts took their food, transport and accomodation with them and as far as I'm aware they didn't even need passports.  "Welcome back from the moon Mr Armstrong.  Do you have anything to declare?"

Still planning does make things easier.  In my case it makes it easier to tell when things are going wrong.  Sometimes I wonder why I bother making plans at all and suspect that a large proportion of it is so that I can look around at reality and assure myself that this isn't what I intended.

The motivation for this rumination on plans and planning is my upcoming and apparently inevitable trip to Europe.  I'm planning on visiting four cities in five weeks.  I tell my friends and family that this is so I have enough time to "do" each city thoroughly.  In actual fact it is to provide sufficient time so that I can hardly fail to see something.  All that I do know for certain is that I will see London because that is where my plane lands.  It would be helpful if I can get to Vienna because that is where my plane home departs from.  Somewhere in between these two fixed temporal and spatial points are supposed to be visits to Berlin and Prague, we shall see.

It's been a while since I went travelling and I rather suspect I'm out of practice.  The last time I organised a holiday on my own they didn't have electronic ticketing and I'm viewing the email with what purports to be my ticket with a great deal of suspicion.  I starting to suspect there might at least be an outside chance that I won't get out of the country at all.  Maybe that could be my plan.