This article begins a series I'm calling "Your Buddy Abroad." It is a collection of articles detailing what I've learned in my experience studying abroad as I learn them.

A few days before I left the country for the first time to study for a semester in Spain, my mom told me she had some important advice for me. She knew a big part of the reason I was going was to travel on the weekends and see the world (okay, just Europe), so she said to me, “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told your sister before she started her semester abroad: Don’t try to do everything.”

She explained that booking yourself solid trying to see everything a city has to offer doesn’t leave you with the best memories. Being spontaneous and unexpected is what you remember when you leave that place.

I kept her advice in mind, but it didn’t really register with me until I took my first weekend trip, just up to San Sebastián in Northern Spain. Honestly, I had done almost no research on what I wanted to do other than talking to people who had been there because I had booked it all last minute. It was on this trip that I realized the two main reasons why trying to see everything never works:

1. When you book yourself solid for your whole trip, you’re probably never going to allocate the proper amount of time to appreciate the sights that you really want to see. Plus, there are always hiccups that leave you running late and with even less time. When all you have to remember your quick stops at important sights are photos, you might as well have just bought some postcards. Which brings me to my second point…

2. When you plan your whole trip, you know exactly what you’re going to see. That sentence may seem pretty obvious, but it can really make a trip boring. You’ll never see the culture of a city, you’ll never learn something new, and you’ll have lived an experience once again comparable to looking at postcards. You’ll see what you expect to see and nothing else.

Now, I would never advise against researching a city before visiting. Without even my minimal research, I never would have gone hiking through the same mountains trekked by pilgrims on El Camino de Santiago (although possibly the word mountain is being generous). Sure, maybe doing a little more research would have stopped me from getting lost, but I don’t really regret that. Good research will tell you about some experiences and activities that can still be enjoyable, unexpected, and informative.

But what you should do is leave yourself a lot of room to decide what you’re doing throughout the trip. Leave yourself “What Next?” Moments. Take a moment to pause, breathe, and ask everyone in your group, “What next?” You can still go look at important sites or do something planned, but don't make that your whole trip. Rather than deciding everything you’ll do before you get there, decide what’s most important and keep those in mind whenever you have a “What Next?” Moment.

Certainly, never let a “What Next?” Moment pass unseized. You should have the legs of an Olympic runner after walking so much. But sometimes what you do with your Moment is just that… walking. Look at shops and restaurants. See if you can find some public entertainment like singers or those fake soldiers who just huddle together and fire blanks (which I refuse to call a war re-enactment). Look through the postcards in a souvenir shop to find a site that you don’t know that you could visit.

It was by looking at a postcard that I remembered that San Sebastián was home to the three Peine del Viento sculptures I had learned about in Spanish classes. I had seen some pictures of them with a sunny backdrop, but the constant rain during our trip (something we’d mourned on our way there) meant that the “Wind Combs” were surrounded by ocean spray and a rainbow hung behind them. We ended up staying there for a while, avoiding being splashed by big waves and trying to get the perfect photos to capture the beauty we saw. We got some great pictures, but I’m glad to say nothing will ever capture or recreate that trip we took because we let ourselves be directed by chance (by the wind, if you will) rather than an itinerary.