How I travel

So I love to travel and I wanted a place to document the sites I find and books I love. I tend to read dozens of books before I go on a trip. For my Rome trip last year I read 17 travel books (not counting the 3 books on how to speak Italian). Which I then systematically dismantled to create a travel book that was perfect for my trip.



See this trip was with my husband, Craig, and it was his first trip to Europe and he is picky picky picky about food so I had to map possible restaurants for each location of the city we might be located in at any point in time. I swear I spent more time mapping this than the Allies did planning D-Day. This is what I came up with:








It was an invaluable tool because I was able to slip it in my purse and reference it at any time, without taking up my suitcase with eleventy billion pages of travel speak. One would think that with all this planning we had a trip scheduled with every moment planned and you couldn't be further from the truth. While we did use Context Travel for a variety of tours (LOVE THEM and so wish they will open tours in Eastern Europe HINT HINT), other than that our time was free. We chose anything we did on the spur of the moment and let me tell you...being spontaneous TAKES PLANNING!.

Anyway that trip was so great that last night when we were talking about my possible future trip to NY, NY Craig said he would rather go back to Rome. YAY! Not that I want to go back there (because there are SO MANY other places in the world and so little time!!) but because he had so much fun I just might get him on a plane across an ocean again :)

So basically I plan plan plan...and then I do anything, everything or nothing!