No time to spare, got to be efficient!

Those tend to be infrequent travelers, though, or young 'uns hitchhiking or railing through Europe. I’ve yet to meet an experienced traveler who hasn’t learned that changing hotels is the worst part of any vacation.

My wife and I have a two-hotel limit. If we’re go to southern France, we might stay a week in Provence, and then change to Saint-Tropez for a few days. Oh, I guess there’s always an extra hotel before departure: we always spend the last night near the airport, but that hardly counts since you don’t unpack. But we look at vacations now from the perspective of “base of operations”.

One of these days we might try a river cruise, although I have this premonition it’s going to be a terrible experience. And we once considered a bicycling vacation run by a company that would move your luggage from hotel to hotel, and you spent the day biking between them. That might be worth all of the hotel changes, but as we get older it gets harder to pack lightly enough to make changing hotels easy.

The “whirlwind tour” is, simply, the most awful concept in the entire history of vacation travel. Oh, and cruise ships. Cruise ships might be worse. I’m glad Venice banned them.