Totally agree. My best trip to date was only planned as far as the hotel of the city we landed in. Even with an unexpected traumatic injury, my partner still agrees it was our best trip. We could stay longer in cities when we wanted to, and leave cities as soon as we felt bored. Compared to other trips where we’d already have hotels booked and felt obligated to leave and stay on those schedules. The worst case was a city hub approach, where we were anchored to an expensive AirBnB. Two day trips in different directions both left me wanting to stay at those destinations.
It’s probably a bit more expensive but even if it was 50% more, it was worth it to me at that stage of my life. Probably more like 10% more. Just need to be mindful for some things, there are absolutely places where some days/weeks have no vacancies across a region. Also seems like way more places post COVID require booking in advance, haven’t traveled since then but I’ve heard it makes this approach much less feasible.
For forests to be a meaningful part of a carbon capture discussion we’d need to be intentionally cutting down and regrowing some trees (which with current technology isn’t not something I’m actually suggesting). Once cut down, the tree matter would need to be stuck somewhere that wouldn’t return to the carbon lifecycle. All the oil we ever burned into the atmosphere over the last century had been firmly removed from the carbon cycle for hundreds of millions of years. Essentially all living plant matter draws carbon from the atmosphere/oceans, but most of that carbon goes back to the atmosphere eventually due to all the things that eat plants, the things that eat those things, the things that eat their waste, etc. Most of the chain after plants weren’t around when the organic deposits that eventually turned into oil were first laid. Heck, I’d bet none of the exact species that gorged on the carbon rich atmosphere are around now either, they’ve probably been outcompeted by organisms that adapted to lower carbon environments. Plants didn’t even decompose initially, because nothing had evolved to do that.
Basic carbon cycle science aside, in my opinion, bringing up forests when discussing carbon capture is exactly like talking about consumer recycling. It’s an easily digestible distraction away from the dozens of solutions that corporations don’t want you thinking about. Wikipedia says if we covered all available land in forests we’d sequester 20 years carbon at the current rate of consumption. Bear in mind, humans are using that land for food and housing, and we’re making every effort to grow the population even more.