Next September, my wife and I are traveling to Chicago for a wedding, then on to the East Coast for our 30th (you heard me right, 30th) wedding anniversary. Our original thought was to do a self-guided fall foliage tour. We’re both natives of Los Angeles and, except for her stint at Washington State University, neither of us has ever lived outside the Golden State. I’ve seen some of the spectacular colors when traveling on business, but Michele hasn’t really experienced the spectacle that occurs annually in places like New Hampshire.

The obvious place to set our route was the Net; we never even considered an alternate source. We Googled “fall foliage tours” and got dozens of sites that showed us routes, made hotel and inn recommendations, and showed photos. From this, we were able to plot our trip.

I knew that our virtual foliage tour was something a lot of people did—whether planning a foliage tour or a trip to Hong Kong. Now the Pew Internet and American Life Project has documented just how many people have used the Net to this end: nearly half. According to a data memo released yesterday, “45% of online American adults have taken advantage of this internet application and taken virtual tours of another location online. That represents 54 million adults who have used the internet to venture somewhere else.”

On any given day, about 2 million Americans are touring “museums, tourist and vacation locales, colleges and prep schools, real estate, historical exhibits, parks and nature preserves, public places such as the White House and the Taj Mahal, and hotels and motels.”

The popularity of such applications are clearly good news for the travel and tourism industry, but bode well for others, as well. Facility tours, for example, would probably attract more online visits than one might have suspected before this data memo was released.

Incidentally, our plans now call for seeing only the foliage that happens to be on our route from Boston to New York. We’ve decided to catch as many baseball games in as many different stadiums as possible, and right now it looks like that will include the White Sox, Red Sox, Mets and Yankees. And just to make all you guys jealous, this was Michele’s idea.