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Monday, August 12, 2013

How-To: Vacation Itinerary

I finally perfected the vacation planning art.  As you know, we went to Colorado Springs in July.  I had to figure out the logistics of puppy care, driving, hotel reservations, and activities as well as meals and workouts. Oh, and I had a budget in mind.  Also, I had a 12-year-old who likes "in the know," so I usually get a few hundred questions about what we are doing and what the plan is.  In anticipation of all of this, I decided to make an itinerary.  And yes, I planned make a vacation binder. I opened Microsoft Word and made a cover page and a template for each day with times and budget.

You can see it here. I used different fonts, so the formatting is a little bit off, but you get the idea.  I printed each page and put it in a plastic sheet protector. Then I put the sheets into a 1/2 inch binder.  I also put any other printouts or special instructions (for rafting) into the binder pockets.  We took a pen and wrote down "actual" costs of activities and meals.  This was great let Alex see the money flow and planning versus actual.  Of course, our plans changed. Saturday night we went to an outlet mall rather than explore Denver. Oh, another key to the Colorado trip was to plug in travel times to Google maps because just driving from place to place was going to take a certain amount of time and we had to factor that in.

I did the same type of document for our trip to New Orleans.  However, that trip was less activity based, so I could condense it to flight and hotel info as well as a foodie list of suggested restaurants and a list of recommended places to go see.

Do you have a vacation planning technique? Do share!

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