If site visits and comments are any indication, people are interested in finding interesting travel experiences through backward thinking. The first thought to come to mind is not “I should go to …” but rather “Where should I go?”

Standard travel websites insist that you know your destination first, but that doesn’t help travelers who are more interested in the experience than the place. Sometimes it’s more fun to plan a trip around a certain type of activity or unique local festivities or random weirdness that makes a place appealing. The problem is we know we want to travel, but we always don’t know what we want beyond that.

In an attempt to find a way to feed that hungry travel bug who can’t decide between the rice noodles of Vietnam, the ugali in Kenya or the vegemite in Australia, I’ve hunted down five more websites that inspire travel — even when we don’t know where we want to go. (Make sure you check out the initial posting of six websites that inspire travel.)

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Sometimes I know exactly where and when I want to travel. In those cases, I hop onto a commercialized website, plug in my destination and arrival and departure dates and I book a trip.

But more often than not I get an itchy travel bug telling me I need to travel, but I find myself asking where should I travel? When should go and for how long? What should I do on my next trip?

So, how do I start searching for my next getaway? In my search to find ways to inspire travel, I’ve found a selection of websites that encourage user interaction and use fun and interesting criteria to help create the ideal vacation dream. While many of these sites encourage vacation bookings directly on the website, I’ve come to use them primarily as trip ignition, which sends my travel bug running in mad circles, excited by brilliant ideas that I can then research more thoroughly elsewhere and book in other places that work better for my travel plans.

Below you’ll find six great sites that travel inspire. Perhaps you, too, will find that these sites excite your itchy feet.

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