If you can’t visit tourist places...why bother going on a trip.
Several years back we took a cruise and found all the side-trips to the tourist sites were full. We walked into town, found a catamarran owner who was willing to take our family out on the ocean around the islands where we were and it was the side-trip of a lifetime. We sailed past boatloads of cruise people crowded on the decks of their boats while our family had sole run with a captain and mate on a magnificent boat. The kicker was that the captain took us for the same price we would have paid on the crowded cruise ship side-trip boats. We thought we were going to have a bad day, but it turned out we had an exceptional day. Tourist places sometimes aren't the way to go - it's the places that live in our memories off the beaten path.