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Originally Posted by WARP TEN
Always love to see and hear about the many unusual places you and Lyndi visit on your trips. How do you find all of them and work them into your itinerary? Is there a particularly good tool to use to set up a leg of the itinerary and search for points of interest on each leg? AAA? Trip advisor? Google etc --Bob
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Hi Bob,
Yes, there are several tools that I use to plan these trips.
I spend lot of time planning a trip. This trip was in planning for almost 15 months. In order to get to stay in the National Park Lodges as we did in Glacier National Park, the reservations have to be made 12 months in advance, so I have to work out the trip dates and NP stays before the reservation deadline.
I use two custom Excel spreadsheets to keep track of the plans and to use while we are traveling. This is the Summary page of the Trip Plan:
Most of the data on the summary page comes from the Day Sheets:
I use the summary sheet to figure out where we will be each day and the mileage and travel time for each day. Then I use the Day Sheet to keep track of the lodging each night and the daily itinerary and attractions along the way.
We choose the Main Event locations (such as Glacier NP and Victoria, BC) and the special locations (such as the visit to Reactor B at Hanford, WA). This creates the overall track and date requirements for the trip.
For the route, I use Google Map. It is the best trip planning tool there is. I sometimes use Trip Advisor to find hotels, but I always make the reservations through the hotel website or central hotel reservation number. It is important to me to get reservations that I can easily cancel, because a lot of changes occur during the planning and during the trip.
I also use Google Map to find hotels, especially on "transit" days where are getting from one place to another for several days.
After the trip sequence and lodging locations are selected, I look at all the cities along the track to find interesting things to do. The Day Sheet with a lot of map links and attractions links, is used to list these so Lyndi can select what we will do each day. She usually does this on an iPad while we are driving when there is cell coverage. She is also good at finding interesting things on the fly such as the rail road observation tower in North Platte, NE.
I also use a Web tool called TripIt to make a quick outline type list of the trip. TripIt has a version for PC and an App version that runs well on an iPad and on a phone. Reservation data is easy to enter into TripIt by forwarding the reservation confirmation email to
plans@TripIt.com:
Jim