Wednesday, March 12, 2008

WFMW - Vacation Travel Planning

Since vacation season will be upon us soon, I thought for "Works For Me Wednesday" I'd write about what "works for me" in trying to make our travel go as smoothly as possible.

All of our family travel is via car and we make all our travel arrangements ourself.

Our trips are usually about 7-10 days in duration and we like to make the most of our vacation time. Something that has helped us to keep on track and have all our important information in one place, is a travel binder.

Inside the binder are maps/driving directions, hotel reservations, restaurant recommendations, planned activities, emergency information etc.

The binder is divided into sections for each day of our trip - even if the day is only spent driving.

The first sheet for each day contains a summary of that day - with information like below:

Date: Saturday (28th) Driving Day

Depart: 5 am
Arrival: Tucumcari 8 pm
Drive: _____ miles (____ hrs)

Motel: Name, Exit Number, Price

Meals:
Breakfast – in car
Lunch – packed lunch
Supper – eat out

Activities: Driving (bulk of day)
Eat supper
Sight seeing

Possible restaurants - addresses and brief summary if necessary.

Comments: Here we can either make notes about the hotel (good/bad), the restaurant and the activities we participated in.

2nd Page: Driving directions and maps for that day

3rd Page: Hotel reservation confirmation sheet

4th Page: Detailed information on planned and alternate activities (location of activity, hours open, fees)

On our return home we can file away these pages for future reference and to assist in any written documents for "Scrapbooking" and family journaling.

Visit "Rocks in My Dryer" for more Works For Me Wednesday Tips.

5 comments:

Sheila said...

Wow, you probably never get into fights with your hubby about directions, then, either! What a great idea.

We also buy postcards for the kids on each day of the trip so that they can write down what they've done that day, and then we have it for a keepsake later on.

Thanks for posting this!

Visit To Love, Honor and Vacuum today!

Amy said...

My mom used to keep a big notebook as a vacation journal. She would write in it every night or two and ask each of us kids what we liked best about the day. I never considered keeping all the directions and stuff, though.

Ice Cream said...

Wow, and I thought I was organized about my road trips. This is awesome!

Anonymous said...

What a great idea, we travel a lot and I haven't thought about making such a list. It would bring a lot of peace to the car when we travel!

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot for the information, it will help a lot Weekend Getaways