Planning a Tour

I really only have two, two and a half pages worth of interesting and useful stuff for a blog, and in case you haven’t noticed, a lot of the rest is just filler. Not that filler isn't a noble tradition in arts and letters: even Homer knew how to turn a catalog of ships into a whole chapter. I think my tips for finding good flights, and/or business class tickets through Delta miles are useful. I also think this is: how to plan your trip properly. With photos!

I’m going to assume you’ve picked a general destination – usually one of the more common hubs: Paris, London, Frankfurt, Milan, etc. Now you’ve got to work out the actual tour details. For this, you will need:

A large travel map of your destination
Colored push pins
A cork board
Reference materials (travel books, magazines, web sites)

You probably have a cork board; a good travel map is $15, maybe, but it will come in handy. $2 for the push pins. For reference materials, go to your library and use sites like Trip Advisor. Prepare your map – attach it to the board, I use large gem clips. Focus on the broader areas you think you may want to hit.

Now, do your detailed research. Read all the guides, and every time you find a site (or restaurant, etc) that you want to go to, pin it. Color code them: for me – dark means “must see”, lighter means “see, time permitting”. Etc. Take your time on this. In the end, you’ll have a pretty good Heat Map of where your vacation will take place.

Hurray! You can start to make decisions: is it worth driving all the way to Site A, then back-tracking to Site B? How many things are there to see at Site C? The map will give you a good sense of how far apart sites are, and how much driving will be involved. Obviously a computer will be more precise, but you have to keep entering the info. This gives you a pretty good view at a glance.

Here’s the key point: The Heat Map you’ve generated in the push pin process will help you decide where you want to stay, and this is something most apps have yet to figure out, which is, where to stay so to minimize transit time while seeing the most of what you can (it’s a fairly complicated mathematical problem, but the human brain does a good job approximating the solution quickly). When you see a heavy cluster of spots, there you go – pick a central location, and it won’t always be in a big city. You may want one spot in between two clusters, for example, rather than having to stay in two different spots. One thing about travel books and web sites is that they are particularly geared towards city locations. That’s often convenient, but getting out and back into city hotels can be a hassle, if you’re taking day trips. Country lodging is often less expensive, and gives you more flexibility. Often you can use public transportation -- trains -- to get you right into the center of a big city. Regardless, the visual on this should give you options you may not have considered through regular booking tools.

Astute readers will have noticed that, in all my previous posts, I haven’t discussed lodging, and this was the reason. I consider the location of the lodging to be of primary importance, and until I know the places I’m going, I can’t make any reservations. There are a couple of spots where I consider the quality and value of the lodging to be so high that I’m willing to build an itinerary around my stay there. But that’s the rare exception, and I haven’t actually acted on it yet. I prefer to see a new place rather than return to one I’ve been to, though eventually I’ll cycle back to here and here.

Anyway, you are, at last, ready to look for lodging in the specific areas you want. I first scout the best places in each likely location, and mark those with yet a different pin -- it's hard to see on the photo above, but my target hotels are pink. You should use some of the more common internet tools to check rates, availabilities, and user/expert reviews of properties. It’s up to you to weigh factors like cost vs. convenience.

I like to be able to travel in a loop that starts and ends at the arrival airport: you want to avoid retracing steps, if you can, that’s wasted driving. And if possible, I prefer to be able to set up camp for an extended stay in one spot. It’s less packing and unpacking, and often better rates, especially on weekly stays. You just have to make sure the location supports enough to do and see in the week, with minimal driving (again, London and Paris work for this, but I really wouldn’t want to spend an entire week in Munich, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or Prague, as lovely as those cities are).

Anyway, when you’ve picked and booked your locations, you’ll make your final adjustments to the map, and that will be your trip. You can’t carry the pinned map with you on the trip, so you can mark up the map with highlighters, write the itinerary down in a planner, and/or transfer it to an itinerary app.

One final benefit of using the map method, and it’s not a small one: it’s really easy to use to discuss planning with your family, including kids. Unless you have a very large screen or projector system, the big map will best show you sights and distances, and let your spouse have more say in what to keep and what to discard. Sure, Rothenburg may be a great attraction, but look – it’s awfully far away from our other must-do sights. Do we really need to squeeze it in? When you see how far it is on the map, your choices get clearer.

Next post: navigating lodging.