Consider a four-day mid-summer trip to the Great Smoky Mountains that had to be planned only a few days in advance.
The traditional resort cities for that trip are Gatlinburg, Tenn. and Cherokee, NC. Both were booked solid.
Nine million people visit the Great Smoky Mountain National Park each year, and it often seems as if half of them are on your hiking trail or along your trout stream.
This is a case where leaving the crowds behind makes good sense and saves money.
Newport, Tenn. will not be confused with a resort town, but it offers a few nice hotels. We booked a two-star room through Priceline.com at a major chain hotel for $48/night. An indoor pool and whirlpool were on site.
Newport sits on the eastern edge of the National Park, a beautiful area that is quite often missed by the masses.
We did miss entering the park through the Gatlinburg-Pigeon Forge corridor and its assortment of souvenir shops and go-cart tracks. Instead, we arrived via the Foothills Parkway, a scenic drive linking busy I-40 to serene Cosby, Tenn.
Armed with a park map, we found a hiking trail Hen Wallow Falls. It was neither lonely nor overrun, always a positive in mid-summer.
In short, it was a lovely four-day weekend in the Great Smoky Mountains with minimal expense and frustration. The only times we hit traffic and overpriced food: when we approached the resort areas.
You can apply this principle to many destinations. In the Florida Keys, avoid Key West, Marathon and Key Largo and look for the place in between that still has vacancy signs.
In Germany, you can sometimes skip the big cities and spend a long weekend in Ostfriesland, where people are friendly, prices low, and the landscape has an untouristed Dutch flavor.
A variation of this technique is to base yourself in a small, inexpensive city that is within a few hours of several nearby points of interest. That way, you avoid the touristy and still see the major attractions.
Choosing a route for these short trips might seem easy, since there is no long itinerary to consider. But many times, in our zeal to optimize the experience, the easy becomes difficult. For some tips on planning, click "next" below.
