(post title blatantly stolen from Richard Feynman’s book of the same name)
During the gray cloudy months that constitute winter here in Seattle (or really, the Northwest in general), I find it both therapeutic and useful to do a lot of research on places I plan to go in the next year or two. Useful because there are a lot of things good to know before I go; therapeutic because learning new things about places I plan on going is some of the best daydreaming fuel there is.
If you’re not already familiar with it, WikiTravel is a really good source for travel research. It’s not as refined as Wikipedia (particularly if you’re looking at less-traveled-by-Western-travelers type places, there are a lot of empty stub articles) but there’s a lot of useful information and links that would never show up on Wikipedia, and it’s organized in a way that makes more sense for travelers than for someone simply looking for general information. Today I was looking at the entry for Belize, as I’m currently leaning toward my winter 2016 charter sailing trip being there. Rather than the sailing and coastal information I normally look at though, I decided to see what I (and my friends) would be able to see if we took a few days of time on land before we started the sailing trip.