Where to begin......?

When I was 19 I applied for my Australian Working Holiday Visa...... 1998 I went, for a whole year. During the previous 6 months I had spent HOURS pouring over this book with a highlighter pen, marking EVERYTHING to do; the usual Barrier Reef, Sydney Opera House, Ayres Rock extra. I had it all planned out, and even though back then I had ZERO money sense or ability to budget so much as a day trip to Liverpool, I went to Australia fully itineraried (if it's not a real word, it is now)

Of course, if you have travelled at all.....especially back in the day.... you'll know that the little knowledge you arrive with soon pales into insignificance compared to the barrage of possibilities that lay before you on touch down. Each city, each Youth Hostel and every other backpacker or wanderer you meet will fill your head with 1000 possibilities of AMAZING places to see, things to do.......and money to spend. I remember very quickly my neatly organised and 'controlled fun plan' went out the window, as each place had so much more to explore than could be contained in my little Rough Guide bible.

What little monetary responsibility I had was obliterated further still; £3000 for an entire year for food, accommodation and all activities is plenty, right?

Week One; hot air balloon ride, car hire, reef snorkling day, Island explore trip and 4 new outfits (?) .........£600.

Don't get me wrong, this will ALWAYS happen. You will arrive somewhere with the best intentions; you'll have a look around, meet a few people, and discover things to do you never imagined........that's the beauty and excitement, and probably the main point of travelling.

But TODAY...... we don't have to rely just on one book. Who needs books at all??!!

We have the internet.

You can Google a city like Amsterdam and immediately you have access to a world of information. Options of where to eat; see the latest pictures of the restaurant; read the up-to-date menu; look at the prices; you can Google Map the address and drop the little orange man onto the street and virtually walk around the area.

You can read reviews of who has been there before; you can join a forum to discuss the place, join another forum to find similar places and if you get chatting, probably befriend someone on Facebook who's been there, become pals and they end up taking you there themselves.

You can Youtube anywhere and you'll find some enthusiast ............(the ones you used to laugh at walking around a market place with a cumbersome camcorder permanently strapped to their hand, viewing their entire holiday through 1 black and white square inch)....posting snippets of every event, attraction and area with all the sites and sounds that let you live the experience before you get there.

When we first decided to go to Amsterdam, I couldn't wait to get stuck in to my research.

About 6 hours later...........(at 2am)..........I began to realize that all of this fabulous information at my finger tips was having the same affect as my first night in Australia.

No, I didn't fall asleep crying for my mum .......(leave me alone, I was a baby of 19 and hadn't been away before).........but I was totally and utterly overwhelming by the amount of possibilities and collection of 1000 things I HAD TO do.

I needed to start with something simple; something structured I could go through to get an overall feel for the place and begin to form and idea of what I would like to do most. Something that would give me information on the local places to be, but not necessarily the obvious tourist stops that were uniformly modified to suit every CityBreak IPad warrior with copious amounts of money to spend.

So I bought a book.