I’m going on a vacation to Japan this year. As I do my research and talk to people, I’ve gotten a lot of places to consider. I obviously can’t do all of them. And I want to be flexible as well. For example, when I’m in Tokyo, there are many different areas I plan to visit. When I’m in those particular areas, I want to be able to look up what I’ve noted. I will have some definite things but if I have time, I want to look at my notes and probably a map to see what’s doable.
Not sure if this is much help but I use Notes. I have a note labeled Vacation, sub notes are labeled with each location if there is more than one stop. Within that are a note for tickler to/do items and then inside the same location note are links to various points of interests links that I have sent to the note once seeing it on the web.
We did a trip last summer to Europe, lots of planes/trains/cars and even a couple boats for good measure. I ended up putting all the details in Obsidian- a large Kanban board and it worked really well.
Each day was a column and each column multiple had list items, some just text, some links to notes, reservations, checkin links, planned activities…
It took a bit to sort out, but was nice to have everything on the phone/iPad just a click away.
When we were planning our family trip to Paris last Christmas, one of the things I did was create a guide in maps. I put every place under consideration in the guide. From there we used Freeform for brainstorming and planning. The finalized plans all went in Tripit. The great thing about the guide is that even the places we didn’t make it to are there and we can hit them on the next trip.
You can also create your own custom guides, like this one that I did for our trip to Strasbourg and Paris or the Bike routes I want to ride with the kids this summer:
What you are seeing is from my Strasbourg/Paris trip. It is sorted in alphabetical order by place name. It can also be sorted by date added or by “distance.” (I haven’t tried distance, but it’s probably closest-to-farthest from where you are standing when looking at the guide)
What’s great is that you can share these custom guides with other people and have them collaborate with you if you want. Also, when you look at the full map of your destination, there will be an icon for all the places you have marked in your guide. So, you can get a visual of how close you are from one thing to the next:
I find it to be a fun way to plan a trip, and maintain a list of places I want to visit on the trip or on a later trip.
To create a new guide, you just press the new guide button (see the second picture above) and off you go. You can save any location you want to your guide.
Also visiting Japan later this year and we’re using a collaborative Google Map which has been pretty handy. Here is an article with instructions on how to build it.
