I've been travelling long enough now to have a collection of beliefs I held with real confidence that turned out to be either wrong, or right for the wrong reasons. None of this is advice. It's more of a personal audit.
Belief: You need to research a place properly before you go.
I used to spend weeks before a trip reading about where we were going. History, food guides, the best neighbourhoods, what to avoid, opening hours. The research felt productive. It also, I think, ruined the places. When you already know that a market is famous and what to expect there, you're arriving to confirm rather than to discover. The times we've been most surprised , in the good way, were when we showed up knowing almost nothing.
Belief: Off-season is always better.
Off-season is quieter and cheaper and sometimes better. But some things only exist because of the crowds , the energy of a city that's full of people, the feeling that something is happening, the chance encounter with another family going through the same confusing thing you are. There's a smugness to off-season travel that I've had to unlearn. Sometimes the season is the point.
Belief: The best restaurants are the ones locals go to.
This one isn't wrong so much as it's become a cliché deployed by tourists to feel superior to other tourists. The restaurant with the handwritten sign and the locals at every table is, these days, often as discovered as everywhere else It's been discovered by a different kind of traveller. Eat where the food looks good. Ask the person at the hotel if they're from there. Judge by the smell coming out of the kitchen.
The best meal we had in Lisbon was in a place that had a laminated menu and was half empty at 7pm. We almost walked past it.
Belief: Travelling with children is harder.
It's different, not harder. You move slower, which means you see more. You stop more, which means you find things you wouldn't have found. Children have a way of making contact with places that adults have forgotten how to do , and they walk up to things, touch them, ask questions, delighted by things you've trained yourself to be too cool for. Japan with a five-year-old was better than Japan would have been without one. I'm sure of this.
Belief: Longer trips are better than shorter ones.
Longer isn't always better. A week somewhere you love, where you're not trying to do everything, is often better than three weeks trying to cover ground. The best weeks we've had were the ones where we gave up on the itinerary by day two and stayed in the same neighbourhood for most of it. The worst trips involved a spreadsheet.