Vacations can be wonderful breaks from the day-to-day routine of daily life. If done properly, a vacation can be very therapeutic, and you may return home with a clear head, increased energy and positive outlook for the near future. However there are many ways a vacation can go wrong. Often times people make some very simple yet catastrophic mistakes in selecting a vacation destination. Below is a list of the top four worst mistakes you can make when planning a trip.

1. Picking a place that "sounds" exotic

There are many places that sound like an exotic, beautiful place to visit, but in reality are far from desirable. Examples of this phenomenon are Myrtle Beach, Queen Elizabeth Islands, Tazmania or Cameroon, Africa. Before settling on any one destination, make sure you do a good amount of reading on what the location is actually like. How it is named and what it sounds like are often completely irrelevant.

2. Traveling to a country whose climate you haven't researched

Always research the climate of a location you plan on traveling to. There are many places on this Earth that experience wildly varying weather patterns depending on the time of year. For example, it would be a grave mistake to visit most South American countries in May, for this is right in the middle of the rainy season. The same applies to visiting Alaska during the winter, as you will likely only see four hours of daylight each day. Drastic changes in climate and weather patterns are common to many popular travel destinations and you don't want to be caught off guard, so make sure you know what to expect.

3. Selecting a destination in a lawless area

Believe it or not, you are allowed to travel to destinations that have very harsh or even non-existent laws. Not everywhere has the fair and just legal society that America does, and if you are a reckless college student who thinks he has nothing to lose, you may be sorely mistaken. Russia, for example, is an extremely unsafe country to travel to if you don't know where the safe areas are. There are more mobsters than police in Russia. Every 18 minutes, someone is assassinated. This type of information might be useful if you have the tendency to be loud and party in public! Venezuela is another country to avoid, as murders happen on an average of five per day. These murders are often over very petty things such as dirty looks or insults. Do some diligence and make sure a place like that is not where you are headed.

4. Choosing a country because it looks nice in Google Images

The images search feature offered by Google (known commonly as "Google Images") can be both helpful and very deceiving if you are tying to get an idea of where to travel to. Often the images shown will be of the very small "good part" of the country, and the vast "bad areas" are not shown, leading you to believe that the whole country looks as it does in the pictures. For an example, lets run an images search on "The Dominican Republic".