24 Hours is all you Need to Visit Any City!

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If you travel as often as I do, you’ll break-up the physical and mental torture of long trips by including a brief stop in a major city of interest, preferably where you’d be connecting to another flight taking you to your final destination.

I’m going to be a heretic and tell you that you can indeed visit just about any major city in the world within a single day. Forget the travel guides whose pages are chock full of “Must Sees” and “Must Dos”. The authors have to fill pages and are thus prone to fishing in obscure waters for dubious interesting places for you to visit. There’s an astounding number of sights in any given city which the natives themselves have likely never heard of, let alone would bother visiting. Why would you travel thousands of miles to waste an hour in a Renaissance pottery museum? If you’ve seen one major zoo, you’ve probably seen them all. Ditto with botanical gardens and city parks. Any science center, natural history museum, or planetarium is pretty much the same the world over. Unless you’re an art fanatic, or your stopover city has a unique collection, art museums will just make you tired and cranky. Old Christian Churches the world over repeat the same dreary themes and can be overlooked, unless we’re talking about something like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona or Notre Dame in Paris. Avoid the sites that are prone to big lineups and be content with seeing them from the outside, or consider an alternative. For instance, in New York, since the loss of the World Trade Center, most tourists will line-up for the observation deck at the Empire State building, not knowing that there’s another observation level at the Rockefeller center. In London, most will head for the “London Eye” not realizing you can get a great panoramic view of the city from atop the Monument, and for just 2 “quid” to boot! Look for those kinds of alternatives and don’t be a sheep!

Books and TV shows greatly exaggerate the importance of dining out. In this day and age, you probably can get a better meal at a French restaurant in your hometown than in some overpriced and overrated joint on the Champs Elysees. Instead of wasting 2 hours at a full service restaurant, grab a bite at a Quick’s (if you’re in Paris) and use the extra time to discover another emblematic site. Walking and riding subways are without a doubt the most efficient, economical and quickest ways to get around just about any big city and see it all. 90% of what you want to see is more than likely to be in the city center anyway. You’ll generally find transit system maps of any city right on the web, which you can download and print. The open air tour buses found in most cities are fun, but are usually very expensive and don’t give you the freedom to explore when and what you want to. The tour buses that do allow you to jump out at any point in their trajectories wind-up wasting you hours waiting for the next bus to come along.

Planning ahead what you’ll visit and how you’ll get there will definitely help you to see everything that needs to be seen in short order. Most importantly: wear comfortable shoes, or blisters will put a damper on your adventures!

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