Taking Charge: Being Your Own Tour Guide

There have always been explorers – people who drew the maps rather than following them. For most of us, however, learning from those who have gone before is not only smart, it’s incredibly easy with all the tools available these days – including smartphone apps that make doing DIY tours simple and fun.

There’s much to be said for serving as your own tour guide. Let’s say, for instance, that you’d like to plan a budget-friendly trip to the bay area. It’s not exactly a notoriously cheap destination, but you’ve found a great hotel deal in San Francisco and you’d like to explore the area outside the city as well. You could sign up for a day trip into Napa Valley from San Francisco, taking all the guesswork out of it and letting someone else take care of all the details. You’d probably have fun, and you wouldn’t get lost – but since doing a self-guided tour of California wine country is so easy, why not give it a go?

Driving in San Francisco may not be any fun, but driving through wine country certainly is – and with a few tools you can make it even more enjoyable. You can use GPS to plot out a route through the most famous vineyards and other sights with helpful apps. You can even follow a prescribed route – but by doing a self-guided tour, you’re free to stop along the way if you see something interesting, or skip something on the tour route if it doesn’t appeal to you. Not only that, as any road trip aficionado will tell you, the potential for getting lost is half the fun.

Once you’ve tackled wine country, there’s no reason you can’t design a self-guided tour back in San Francisco before heading home, too. Even if you didn’t plan ahead, you can easily download a smartphone app or look up an itinerary online for a walking tour.Doing a DIY tour can be very relaxed and save you quite a bit of cash as well.

By the way, if you’re planning a wine country tour that includes lots of wine tasting and there’s no designated driver, you should stick to a guided tour where someone else is doing all the driving – but if your tour is more about the sights and food than the vino, by all means take control and be your own guide.

– by Jessica from BootsnAll

photo by star5112

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