It's so hard to be spontaneous.

The trouble with spontaneity these days is that all the tourirsts have got everything completely booked up.

When I was still at university, one of our professors used to say: "Fail to plan is plan to fail".

It is difficult to afford to be spontaneous when one has limited time. If you move to Utrecht for a year, you can be spontaineous. Now, you need to take into account opening times, waiting times, transport schedules, budget, and safety. Your parents probably had a safer environment and trusted in good. Now, I personally do not go on a trip if I do not know how and when I am going home.

You can be spontaneous on your trip but brace for some disappoinment if you cannot get into the place you want to see because you had not booked it two weeks in advance. If you don't care about disappointment (much), then take care of your safety and be spontaneous as you like.

I agree with both Lin and Kootah. I've mentioned this before, but even here in London things I used to be able to do spontaneously, like go to a museum exhibition, are no longer possible without advanced planning due to getting booked up quickly. I don't even mean for really huge events like the Bayeux Tapestery, even smaller ones with less familiar artists/topics/etc.

I personally am a planner- both because I like to know what I'm doing in advance and because I genuinely enjoy the planning, which to me is half the fun of a trip. If I'm going all the way to a new destination, and I have things in mind I know I want to see, I'm not going to leave that to chance if I can book ahead. Plus things like transport and accommodation are often less expensive if booked in advance (i.e. the best value hotels may be the first to sell out).

Of course people who want to be spontaneous should be! But just be prepared you may not get your first choice of food/accommodation/etc and you may miss out on things you wanted to see. But for some people they are happy to make that trade-off. There's no right or wrong way.

Agree with the two previous posters.
When I first visited Europe in the early 80s, you could easily go on your own, not book hotels or sites in advance. My guide was Frommer's guide or Europe on $10 a day.
NOW, WAY more people are touring Europe. Most of the important sites you much book in advance. Also, for lodgings, it can be a huge problem if you visit a city where a big event is taking place. Example, I wanted to visit London for about a week last year after our Cornwall and Devan tour. I found that all the hotels near Victoria Station were full. I changed our plans and did London after the tour, and it worked out fine.

One thing about basing in a city and taking the train, it works ok if your trip is less than an hour, because you waste time getting to the station and waiting for the train. Further, you waste more money on travel.
Also, we didn't book our rail trips when we visited Bavaria two years ago and all our trains had standing room only, which was not good since I have a bad knee.

Do your research and enjoy learning about what is great to see. Find nice lodging and enjoy it, don't take chances on touring.

You can build some spontaneity into a planned trip: you can plan to see an area within a given province without knowing exactly what to expect, or you can write a list of things you'd like to see and choose from the list. Must-sees can be fixed in stone but you might have a number of other things that are maybes and can choose one at random. And you can get around your problem of not planning accommodation by only choosing to book while you are at the destination before (i.e. phoning a day or two ahead). That means you haven't left it all to chance (hard to do nowadays), but you build in flexibility so if you come across something you'd like to do, you can change plans.

My daughter hates planning ahead and prefers spontaneity so I do a version of the above on my trips with her. There is enough give so that if we decide we'd prefer people-watching one day instead of that gallery, we can do it.

Lavandula

I'm more on the spontaneous side - when we're in London, we have accomodation booked and that's it, and that's the way we tend to travel to most places. I was in Myanmar a couple of weeks ago and had a hotel booked, and everything else was just spur of the moment, including train trips- nothing planned in advance. We're in Penang next month and we haven't even sorted accomodation. In Istanbul earlier in the year, we booked a hotel, but nothing else - one day we took a two hour ferry ride to Bursa without any preplanning- had a great time. We're in Mumbai in November, hotel booked, but no other plans yet.

That said, I'm not fussed by fancy restaurants, and prefer not to go where everyone else is queuing up to see. We did miss the Sagrada Familia when we were in Barcelona in February due to not prebooking, but havent missed anything else I can think of.

The other problem is that you need to plan at least a bit to know which things can still be spontaneous! A current example: given the weather forecast, I want to go to the nearby coast - about 90 minutes on the slow local train - for a few days and get on a ferry or two to an island.

That seems to have potential for spontaneity ... except that at this time of year, none of the [small] islands have available accommodation, or if they do, it's subject to minimum stay requirements. Oh, and the cheap ferry to the nice car-free island that doesn't require advance booking is tidal and only runs once a day, so a day trip requires the expensive (and pre-booked!) fast ferry unless I want an immediate turnaround. And the swimming times at the coastal beaches are also tide-dependent, so no quick dips after lunch if the tide is out ...

Now, as a local I know all this and have made my arrangements accordingly. But someone just looking at the map and the weather and hoping for a nice short break is going to be pretty disappointed. Just as somone arriving at 1pm to discover the cool weekly market closes at 12 noon would be.

There are options where lots of flexibility is possible (e.g. the Baltic beaches aren't tidal; you can hire a pedal boat all day every day in front of the local castle; the market is four times a week in summer) but again, you need to have done the research to know what options there are.

The 'turn up and hope' approach really only works these days when you a) have a fairly big budget, b) are in a place big enough to have multiple accommodation options, and c) no particular preconceptions about what you want to see and do beyond generalities like 'mountains', 'old buildings' and 'eat ice cream'. Otherwise, you're really riding your luck.