How will we get there? Where will we stay when we are there? What kind of food or restaurants are nearby? What is there for us to see or do? What should we pack? For each of these questions, we use the background knowledge we gained from researching the place to form a plan for our trip- sort of like hypotheses for how our trip will go!
For example, we knew from our research that the weather in Singapore and Thailand is usually very hot, so we predicted that we would wear mostly shorts and lightweight clothes. We learned that Indonesia has lots of cool mountains and volcanoes, so we predicted that we would want to do some hiking while we were there. We looked at lots of reviews online to predict which hotels would be best to stay at and which restaurants would have the tastiest food. We even had to predict how long we would want to spend in each place we visited so that we could pick out our flights!
After that comes the fun part: testing our hypotheses! When we actually go on our trip, we try out our plans and all of the educated guesses we made about the place. For example, I predicted that I would really like scuba diving and snorkeling in the Philippines because there is so much marine life to see, and my prediction was correct! Sometimes, however, we find out that the research we did before our trip didn't prepare us for what we would experience and that our hypotheses were wrong. We might have guessed that our hotel would be a great place to stay, but realize once we get there that we would have rather been in a different part of the city. The weather might be hot and sunny most of the time, but maybe we didn't predict the rainy afternoons.
