Planning a Trip - Starting From Square One

Even though I've honed my vacation planning process over the years, every time I sit down to plan the next trip, I'm always mildly overwhelmed by the undertaking. There's a lot of moving pieces that have to come together: the when, where, why and how of it all.  Different kinds of trips demand different approaches. For our upcoming spring break trip, the process looked something like this: 

Step One - When

Our school-aged kids' spring breaks overlapped for an 8-day span, so it was a pretty easy matter of nailing down the "when" for this trip. The specific details of "when" would come back into play again once we nailed down the "where".

Step Two - Deciding the Where, as Justified by the Why

The map my daughter has used for years to track the states she's traveled to.

We've nearly traveled to all of the states in the U.S. and so knew that we wanted to knock a few more off the list on this trip. So, with our motivation thus established, the next step was considering which of our 9 remaining states to hit. The biggest concentration of states-needing-to-be-visited were in the central part of the country, giving us the biggest bang for our buck, so it was settled that the trip would include Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas (I have shared previously that we're pretty aggressive in terms of covering wide swathes of ground in limited spans of time!). 

The next task was to zero in on potential routes. For expediency and cost-effectiveness, I typically choose to start and end in major cities with international airports. My entire family gives me grief about it, but the tool I use for thinking a route through is MapQuest. I look at the major cities in the areas I want to go to, and then just start experimenting with various routes to see how much ground I can reasonably cover in the time I have, recording the driving time between potential stops.  I'm simultaneously searching for supplemental information about those stops to inform routing decisions -- so I'm Googling "Top 10 things to do in Topeka", etc, taking in what the official travel bureaus have to say, as well as Trip Advisor rankings and recommendations from local blogs. I record the activities ideas along with links to the source materials in a Word or Google doc to reference later when I get down to details. 

Through this process, after about two hours in this instance, I had a route that had us setting foot in all five states, seeing and doing things of interest in each, and which didn't have us driving more than 4.5 hours on any given day (which is the maximum I was willing to do for this trip... the ideal for us is probably around 2.5 hours a day, but to get where we wanted to go for this trip, we had to expand that ideal somewhat).

Step Three - Refining the When and How

With my route thusly roughed out, it was time to revisit timing with an eye toward making our travel most efficient and minimizing airfare expenses. Knowing that we'd be starting in Omaha, Nebraska and ending in Austin, Texas, I began looking at multi-city flight options on Kayak.com, adjusting my dates of travel to see the kinds of prices with which I'd be contenting. (Note that if you are doing a straightforward roundtrip, use Kayak's "show flexible dates" option that presents a grid with fares for the 3 days preceding and following the travel dates entered to easily see what the possibilities are for economizing -- it's sometimes astonishing what moving a trip by a day can do for its price.)

At this point in my process, a wrinkle arose in that it became apparent that there were no direct flights from our home airport, meaning for a longer travel day to get to and from our destinations. This resulted in a decision to have our daughter fly separately from the airport nearest her college to meet us in Omaha, rather than spend a day traveling to meet us and then having another full day of traveling immediately thereafter. This complicated flight booking a bit, as there was a chance that seats for her flights could have sold out while I was booking for the rest of us, but fortunately, everything was copacetic. 

Step Four - Refining the Where

With travel dates now in hand, I could pull up my "Things to To" document created earlier and work up a draft itinerary, spreading our activities and drives across the time available to us. A few days in abbreviated form would look something like this:

Friday, March 4:  AA Flight #123 Arrives OMA 9:45 PM; Car Rental: TBD;  Hotel: TBD

Saturday, March 5: To do: old market, KANEKO gallery, Bob Kerry Pedestrian Bridge (spans NE & IA); Drive 4.25 hours to Kansas City; Dinner: Stroud's; Hotel: TBD

Sunday, March 6: To do: Nat'l WWI Museum, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Blue Room Jazz Club; Drive 1 hour to Topeka in PM; Hotel: TBD

Monday, March 7: To do: Brown vs. Board of Education NHS; Drive 4 hours to Tulsa, stopping as possible at Golden Driller roadside attraction; Dinner: Blue Dome District; Hotel: TBD

Step Five - Nailing down the Where

With the itinerary fleshed out, the final step is rental car and hotel booking. Since we're Costco members, we usually use their car rental benefit. We've found the price to be competitive. I just learned about AutoSlash, which lets you reserve a car and then continues to seek lower prices on your behalf up until your day of arrival, which is awesome. 

As for hotels, we have certain chains that we like and so I frequently do a quick Google search for "hotels in xyz city" and then look at the resulting map which will show a variety of hotel properties (not all to be sure) for the chains we know. I'll check to see how close they are to the sites we're seeing in the city and look at their Trip Advisor ratings. Sometimes we go with our chosen chain, other times, a highly-ranked Trip Advisor hotel will catch our fancy. I usually book the no-cancellation advanced booking rate to save a few dollars. 

Different Trips... Different Planning Processes

This vacation was fairly easy to plan, because our time was prescribed, and we had an agenda (to check a few more states off of our list). Other trip ideas might feel a little more "nebulous", so I'll need to talk to friends or family about their experiences, buy multiple guidebooks, and/or review my collection of travel magazines for relevant articles. For me, either way, it's all about diving in!

Traveling With Kids 101

If you have children with whom you've vacationed, you have at least one "nightmare" travel story. It happens to all of us, and, the one thing we can be assured of is that it will continue to happen. Your vacation will run amuck in some way: your progeny will be embarrassingly ungracious in front of relatives and strangers alike; after an excellent first ski, they will brutally bruise a shin re-boarding the boat and be unable to waterski for the remainder of the planned all-day activity; they will whine incessantly in the backseat about sibling "side encroachment"; they will pee on your sister's heirloom quilt as you change their diaper on the bed like you have a thousand times before at home without incident; they will leave a precious stuffed animal behind in a hotel room but not realize it for another 2 days when there is no hope for its retrieval; they will request an emergency bathroom break after you've passed the last rest stop for 50 miles; they will become annoyed with the friend (their friend!) you've brought along on vacation to make it more fun for them. 

You too will will contribute to the amuck-running by virtue of faulty map navigation that adds an extra hour of drive time to a 6-hour drive day;  you will learn that half of your family is allergic to horses at the 30-minute mark of a 2-hour trail ride; you will unintentionally book a room at a hotel that is hosting twenty U-14 boys soccer teams, all of whom are watching their televisions very late into the evening at max volume.

There is a silver lining: the "horror" of these experiences fades over time, leaving excellent stories that will be referenced at the dinner table for years.

Meanwhile, until that perspective is gained, among things I've found that made travel with kids easier.

1. Travel with another family so your kids have playmates. The vacations my kids remember most fondly are those taken with family friends and relatives where they had same-age companions. These were fun for us parents as well, as we didn't need to be the sole sources of entertainment all the time.
2. Plan an itinerary that's mostly all-family activities, but with a few stops that meet individual kid's specific interests. This way, there's something for everyone, but there's also a lot of shared experiences.  Model patience and flexibility so that your kids learn to be tolerant of participating in activities they might not choose for themselves and develop resilience when things don't live up to expectations. 
3. Let kids play with video games or watch movies during drive and or flight time, limiting technology use when it's important that they be active participants. For example, we have a family rule that there's no technology use (phones, gaming devices, computers) when we're inside the boundaries of a National Park. It applies equally to us adults too!
4. Shop before vacation for books, games, movies and gadgets for each child to parcel out throughout the trip to smooth over challenging/boring bits. Include some items that are educational or creative. For our family, that meant Magic School Bus books/DVDs, Professor Layton 3DS games, puzzle books, and key-ring games like Boggle and 20 Questions. 
5. Find a good book to read-aloud to the whole family during car rides to break up screen-time and introduce your kids to good literature. The Harry Potter books were being released as my kids were growing up... they offered enough action and suspense to make everyone want to hear another chapter, and another, instead of wanting to get back to their Pixters and Nintendo DSes. Other worthy reads include:
   • The Anybodies by N.E. Bode
   • Paul Stewart's Far Flung Adventures series
   • All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
   • Tolkien's The Hobbit
   • Madeleine L'Engle's  A Wrinkle in Time series
   • Trenton Lee Stewart's The Mysterious Benedict Society
   • Kaye Umansky's Solomon Snow series
   • The Last Dragon by Silvana De Mari
   • From the Mixed-Up files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
   • Terry Pratchett's Tiffany Aching series

The toughest ages to travel with, in my experience, were the 1-4's and 12-15's. The youngers don't have great stamina and need a lot of attention. For us, ideal vacations for this age range were those that included grandparents in some way. They were glad to help share some of the child care responsibilities, spelling us for a bit. On the other end of the spectrum, tweens and early teens can be thankless travelers. Throw them a bone and vacation with others who have kids, or skew the activities to high action/high-interest. This is a good time to include a theme park in the mix, or a special theatrical production (think Cirque du Soleil), or one-of-a-kind experience (swimming with manta rays). But, don't make it all about them either. Make them join you on that 3 mile round trip hike to an alpine meadow, or to go see that glass-blowing demonstration, or get out of the car for that photo op at the Continental Divide. They may not appreciate it while they're in the midst of it, but all of my kids have said that later, in retrospect, they were glad for the experiences their travels with us afforded them. 

It Begins...

Over the years, friends and family have asked me to share itineraries from our family's vacations. Eventually it occurred to me that (a) it would be easier to put them all up on a blog so I could just point such seekers there, and (b) there were likely others outside my immediate circle who might just be interested in them as well. 

As I considered the idea, and picked the brains of fellow travel enthusiasts, my concept expanded beyond the functionality of a basic blog and thus, vettedvacations.com was born. It's still very much a work in progress, but I wanted to launch it to get feedback from early "stumblers-upon" so as to inform its future direction.

The "Mountain State National Parks" trip is the most complete at present... other trips, which currently only feature linked itinerary outlines and route maps, will all eventually include narrative versions of the itineraries, photos, and recommended resources. To the extent that folks have reactions and/or information with which to supplement our family itineraries (e.g. alternative lodging suggestions, dining recommendations, activity ideas), a curated "Suggestions" component is planned as well. I'm also hoping to adjust the map functionality in the longer term as well... the design platform I chose doesn't yet support what I'd envisioned, so, crossing my fingers for a solution on that front soon!

Blog posts will be forthcoming on a weekly basis if I can keep to the discipline of writing -- they'll range from referencing travel articles of interest to discourses on my travel planning process as it happens "in real time". You can follow Vetted Vacations on Instagram and Facebook to know when there's a new post, and for inspiring travel photos, and reposts of random travel content that appeals to me and so therefore might be of interest to you.

A few last caveats:

• A few trips herein were taken as long as a decade ago, so, while I did check to make sure that all aspects were still "viable", there are likely new options to consider.
• We are a family who likes to be on the go... some might consider these itineraries to be "aggressive" in terms of how much ground is covered in a relatively short period of time. If you fall into that camp, hopefully you'll still be able to use an idea or two to inspire your trip.
• When we vacation, we live "larger" than we do at home. We invest in experiences and hotels that are pretty spectacular. It's completely possible, however, to follow the itineraries you'll find here without staying in 5 star hotels -- there are a plethora of lodging options to be found, be it via Airbnb or TripAdvisor, or camping.com. The important part is just getting out there and experiencing the world!

I'm eager to hear what you think about Vetted Vacations... please send your thoughts by using the Contact form. 

Happy trails!