Tours are expensive!

Fully guided tours have tangible benefits that are most obvious when you don't know much about where you're going, you don't want to deal with the gritty details and you have a wee bit of cash that allows someone else to take care of all that.

For these reasons, tours and tour guides deserve our deep and humble respect. I, by contrast, am not a tour guide and I couldn't do it if I tried. It's just not how I travel.

Occasionally, though, we do book tours and use tour guides, usually as day trips. Tours handle the transportation, which can be tricky if you're going someplace that doesn't offer public transportation. Tours also handle the entry to sites, and you probably won't need to wait long or at all (woe to the unknowing traveler who ventures out at 10 a.m.!).

At this point in our travel career, we usually know a lot about the places we're going - as much as, or more than, the good people leading the tour. So we might meet a day trip at a train station or major attraction, and then when the day is done we return to the train station and our flexible lives.

For these situations, a day trip is an efficient and cost-effective way to travel. Just beware the 12- or 14-hour tour that hustles you to four or five sites, perhaps most of which you didn't want to see anyhow.

My big hint?

Consider taxis or hired drivers.

These professionals know the roads and their communities. They probably give less information than tour guides, but that's fine if you've been reading up on sites as long as we have.

Although costs vary, a taxi or hired driver likely costs 10-50 percent of a tour.

I faced this exact dilemma while planning our "retrip" to England (it was originally scheduled for 2020, but we all know what happened then).

We wanted to see a particular filming location for one of the TV series we've long admired. No tour covered it. We didn't have a week to spare for an extended "luxury tour." It's not how we live at home and it's not how we travel when we're away from home.

Instead, I posted on a travel site discussion forum - what to do? "This" is where we were staying, "this" is what we wanted to see, there didn't seem to be public transportation to the site, we didn't want to walk that far (miles and miles) and we didn't want to drive (I've driven internationally, and although we were reassured that we'd love it and it would be no big deal, in reality it was a hot mess and I don't plan to ever do it again).

I got a quote for a "customized day trip" and it was roughly five times what we could afford.

The solution was simple. Take the train to the nearest station, hire a taxi for a certain number of hours, and have the taxi return you to the station when it's done.

Yes, it costs money, but only about 10 percent of a "customized day trip." We had done three decades' worth of research on this particular topic and location; we just wanted to see it for ourselves. This, then, made sense for two reasonably well studied and scrappy but also frugal travelers.

Maybe it will make sense for you as well.