Planning for Vacation

Family vacation this summer is going to be a doozy. First off, Doug is not coming, so I'm on my own with the kiddos. Then, this is a car trip spanning the entire United States. Maybe that's a bit of an overstatement, but not much.

To make it fun, I am doing some serious planning. That is where most of my free time has gone in the past five months.

Planning a Route & Activities:
The first, most important step. I don't want to think about where we are going when I've been in the car with children all day and my brain is fried. Since we're going to be in the car anyway, we decided to take a slightly longer route to include some places we've never seen. Like the Alamo and New Orleans (woot!).

Next I started looking for things to do along the way. My thought is that having a place to stop every two hours or so gives us something to do and keeps the driver(s) awake. It also allows us to experience the areas we're going through, instead of just experiencing yet another freeway/highway/gas station.

My favorite site for this is aaa.com. If you're not a member, it won't do much. But if you are a member, you can plan trips using its online tool. There are places to stop, hotels, and much more, all vetted by AAA. The only caveat I have for you on this site is to make your trips day by day instead of linking them all together in one large trip. The site has a tendency to get overwhelmed with large trips. Am I the only one doing cross-country trips? Really?

Mapquest has pretty much the same feature...you just click what you want to see to show hotels, restaurants, activities, etc. The buttons are just on top of the map.

Another site I found useful was mapofplay.kaboom.org. If you have kids, it is helpful to know where playgrounds are located along the route. I now have a list of playgrounds...just in case.

Booking Hotels:
I didn't often use AAA to book a hotel, because their website is a little clunky, didn't always have the best rates, and didn't include many hotels that were acceptable for me and my family.

I found that Booking.com was my favorite for hotels. Sometimes a cheaper price can be found using the hotel's website, sometimes not. Booking.com, though, allows you to book multiple rooms with different parameters. For us, we have four rooms, each with a different number of people - and children. Most websites didn't accommodate the differences. Hotels.com is also one of my favorites, but this site has you pay up-front for hotels. Bleh.

Making Travel Books:
Oh, yes, I did. I made books for us to travel with, spiral-bound and everything. Pockets serve as our cover and as a way to store any paperwork we collect along the way (brochures, maps, etc.). Each section starts with overview directions, followed by information on each place we could be stopping. They are pretty thick - so much so that I had to separate the trip out to Jersey from the trip back home. S'okay.

I chose spiral binding because we can keep the book open to wherever we are, instead of trying to manage a sheaf of unbound pages, or worse, trying to not break the binding on a tape-bound book. Yes, this is where my training as an editor/publisher of training manuals comes into play.

Planning for Food:
This was one of the last steps. Food is not something you have to reserve in advance - unless you are going to a fancy restaurant. I am not going to be doing that with five kids, let me tell you. Travel food was pretty easy. If we are going to be in a cool foodie city (New Orleans, Philly), we eat there. If we are not, we eat out for dinner...that's when we'll be tired and not interested in trying to forage for food.

We're packing breakfasts for when hotels do not provide: cereals, muffins, yogurts and fruit. Easy.

Lunches can be sandwiches, wraps, fruit & cheese, veggies & peanut butter, or salads. When we're not eating out.

Dinners can be salads when we're not eating out - let's face it, after all those calories eating out in a foodie city, we'll need a light dinner!

Then there's the nights we're at the beach house. Since I have kids that will be super-tired of travelling, I'm planning on making dinner and hanging out there at least each evening. So I planned meals that will be easy to make, that can be put together on the table to allow picky eaters to eat only what they please (both kids and adults), and that will be light enough to make up for all the lunches eating out. Again.

I think we're ready.  You will, of course, get pretty constant updates. As often as we have Wi-Fi.

The little ones are ready!

Wahoo! Road trip!