Planning a Road Trip

I have plenty of experience planning weekend road trips and even one week long road trip, but I've never before faced the challenge of planning a two week long trip into unknown territory where the goals are to see and do as much as possible. It was definitely a challenge!

I started out just mapping out a route on Google Maps. That's how I learned that there was no way we would be able to go to Newfoundland. There just wasn't enough time. My first disappointment but I moved on.

I then added the letterboxes I wanted to find on our trip to the route. New adjustments needed to be made.

And then came the fun part. I love that we have the internet because it makes planning so much easier. The first thing I searched on Google was "free things to do in . . . " and named each town and city we would be passing through. Many of these were added to our route and I kept the print outs just in case we found we had extra time or a planned activity didn't work out.

Next step was to Google "best things to do in . . . " and selected activities and places to visit to our route. The final step was to look for scrapbooking stores. I found very few but added those few to our route.

The final step was to book our motels. I personally use Expedia but there are plenty of good web sites out there. I am never looking for fancy. When looking for a motel, my goals are inexpensive, decent rating, free breakfast, and decent reviews.

As you can imagine, by this point I had a ton of print outs and it was getting a bit ridiculous trying to keep track of everything. I needed a system. I pulled out 14 big manilla envelopes and labelled each one with a date. I put all the information for each day into the labelled envelopes. Planning suddenly became much simpler.

I then made a title page for each date and added that to each envelope.

So when we were ready to leave on Day 1 at 6 am, this is what happened . . . 

The best part about this system is that each day all the receipts, brochures, ticket stubs, etc. were tucked into the appropriate envelope. Now that I'm back home with these handy envelopes scrapbooking our trip will be so much simpler.