Happy new year! I hope you’re having a lovely 2019 so far. Now that we’re officially into the new year, that means our next vacation is just around the corner!! And this is a big one – we’re going to Europe!
We’re deep into the planning process for the trip since it’s only a few weeks away, and I thought this might be a fun opportunity to show you some of my planning techniques. If you know me you may know that I LOVE to plan, especially vacations! Here’s a bit of a deeper look into how we plan our fun-filled travels…
To start off, check out the video below for a look into the most extensive planning tool I use – my spreadsheet:
Trip Planning – General
When making plans and deciding what to do, my biggest resource is obviously the internet. I rely on youtube videos, TripAdvisor reviews, and travel blogs to decide what we wanna do. Obviously your mileage may vary here, but I spend a LOT of time researching and getting ideas for what is important to us. This is a tedious part of planning but to me it’s also the most fun!
Google Sheets is my go-to for laying it all out, and I’ve used it pretty much since the beginning of my planning aspirations. When making a spreadsheet for a trip, I usually start out with a dumping ground for ideas, which gets turned into a schedule once we have dates confirmed and can start mapping out the trip. I also use it for budgeting and listing all of our bookings in one place. I usually download a copy of the spreadsheet to offline mode before we leave so I have everything I need the whole time we’re traveling.
Google custom maps are also super helpful to plot everything out and see where you’ll be spending your time!
And of course – asking for recommendations is fun too! Just be careful not to get too overwhelmed when everyone gives you 10000 cool things to do and look at 🙂
I also have a lot of great resources for this trip specifically, to London, Paris & Disneyland Paris!
London & Paris Resources
- For London, I’ve really liked Love and London – like I mentioned in the video, this has been really helpful to me in planning out our London days and must-dos. She also has a youtube channel of really helpful videos.
- One of the most important parts of planning is knowing how we’re going to get around. The public transport websites for each location have been immensely helpful in figuring out the best routes to get from place to place – I used Transport for London and RATP for this purpose. I also found a SUPER helpful app called Citymapper that looks for the fastest and cheapest routes through every available form of transportation.
- For Paris planning, I was able to make a pretty good list of must-dos from this list! There are SO many good Paris planning blogs, and it seems like there’s so much to do that there’s really no bad way to explore the city.
- Disneyland Paris is its own category of planning – as mentioned in the video, my favorite Disney blog is Disney Tourist Blog, and they’ve been invaluable in planning for DLP. I also have found a lot of really helpful vlogs – one of my favorite channels for DLP has been See You in Main Street, they’re super cute and have lots of great DLP tips!! We also made sure to download the Disneyland Paris app before we get there too. I honestly find Disney destinations to be a lot easier to plan than non-Disney, but it’s still helpful to have lots of tips and advice 🙂
- A few more things specific to this trip – I also downloaded a currency converter app (I like this one) as well as Google translate, which I don’t think we’ll have to use much but is good to have just in case! I’ve also found a lot of helpful tips about packing for a winter trip (which we don’t do very often) – like here, here, and here.
I think the most important takeaway from all of this is that it’s important to do SOME form of preparation when planning a trip. I know not everybody plans in the same crazy obsessive way that I do, but I honestly get a lot of joy out of mapping out all the little details! I think it pays off to have at least a brief idea of what you want to accomplish on a vacation – it certainly has for us 🙂
But that’s pretty much the thought process that goes into our planning. Obviously, these are new destinations for us, so I’m interested to see how all the researching and preparation pays off!! I’m really excited and I know we’re going to have a great time. We have so much to look forward to – seeing Les Miserables in London, exploring the beautiful city of Paris, visiting our first international Disney park, celebrating our first wedding anniversary, and of course going to Europe together for the first time!! It’s going to be so amazing and I just can’t wait. A month from now we’ll be world travelers!
I hope you enjoyed this sorta different blog post and video! I love talking about this kind of thing so perhaps I’ll do it a little more in the future for other trips too. Thanks so much for reading and watching and I’ll see you next time ❤️
xo,
