If you’re in the mood for a different kind of holiday and not interested in crowds, try designing a holiday trip around your favorite artist. To do this, your first stop is to go online and research your favorite artist and their haunts. Say you’re a big Vincent Van Gogh fan and you’re interested in having a holiday around his life and wish to walk in his steps. The first place would be to visit a commemorative stone declaring his former birthplace (since it was torn down in 1903 and replaced with real estate offices) in Zundert, The Netherlands. From there, your holiday could move onto Van Gogh’s Church where he was baptized as a child and where his dad, Theo, was named pastor there. The church still stands today.

The tour will then move to Belgium and France that include, but aren’t limited to, Paris and The Borinage. You get the general idea, though. An artistic holiday, however, isn’t restricted to painters. Whatever your creative flair happens to be, you can have an artisan holiday without ever leaving your city. A great idea would be a walking tour of the places that famous writers frequently visited or died in New York City. Visiting watering holes that like James Joyce, J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac frequented are found online for your walking tour holiday (That would be Chumley’s, incidentally.) Another place to visit—or pass by—would be The Wrinkle In Time series author’s Madeleine L’Engle’s West End Avenue residence and one’s final stop could be in Harlem where Black writer Langston Hughes died in 1967.