Once you have marked the ideal itinerary on the map of your imagination, you need to find a way to transform it into possibility. In short, you must turn chaos into order.
Researching everything needed to transform the inkling of an idea into a feasible and mature thought conveys me to a state of blissful excitement. I don’t have a set strategy. I collect everything, bundle it all up and drag it into the safety of my lair (my study). Then I arrange it in a very specific place as close to my desk as possible, first of all to avoid disturbing my books, which jealously guard their own space, and secondly so that I have everything I need at my fingertips.
The second phase involves the Internet. I almost always weigh anchor in the evening and, even with the unfavourable winds of my multimedia ignorance, I keep sailing late into the night, locking away what I find in the strongbox of the file I will reopen the following afternoon to separate what is useful from what is probably useful or unquestionably superfluous.
As a result, the initial itinerary changes week to week, and only after months of careful work will I know what kind of trip I will take. As I have already pointed out, however, I won’t be able to tell you my actual route until I get back.
Nonetheless, preparing a trip involves more than choosing an itinerary. Preparation also means deciding which cities to visit (why this one rather than that one), which means of transport to use and which hotels to stay in. It means examining the climate of the area, possible variables, and many other seemingly trivial details.

My “hunt” is never a simple outing from dawn to dusk, but the constant pursuit of something that will not be definitive until “the end of the hunting season”.