Doug Mack on the drawbacks of over-planning one’s travels

“But where’s the fun? Where’s the adventure? It’s not just “If it’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” it’s “If it’s seven o’clock, this must be the Café Le Petit Obsessive-Compulsive, this wine must be the Pinot Noir that I read about on Wines.com, the server must be Yvette, who got high marks on TripAdvisor, and I have to be done eating by eight o’clock so that I can follow the Google Map instructions to the subway station and use the Paris Metro app to catch a train to Montmartre, where I will snap a photo exactly like the one I saw on WikiTravel, which I will then upload to Facebook at the Internet café recommended on the bulletin boards at Yahoo! Travel because they accept American credit cards.”

–Doug Mack, Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day (2012)