With all the business of the holidays behind us, and less than five weeks to go (!), I’ve jumped back in to trying to figure out what this 11 weeks is going to look like.
It’s turned out to be somewhat of a challenge. Amazingly, there’s so much to see and do in this region (and, of course, the necessity of so much more time and trouble getting around) that 11 weeks doesn’t even seem like enough to see everything we want to see.
I’m trying to be very conscious of striking the right balance between touring around and seeing the sights, and having time to just be somewhere, relaxing and hopefully getting to know the culture. We also need to build in time for school activities for the kids. And above all, during this 11 weeks I want to avoid rushing. In our normal life at home, we’re always having to tell the kids to hurry, hurry, hurry. I think we could all use a break from that.
The cross-country plan. Color-coded by time zone, of course!
The other challenge is security vs. flexibility. I have a well-deserved reputation as a planner. In general, especially when traveling with the kids, I like to know where I’m going to end up at the end of the day and how I’m getting there. Driving around at 10pm searching for a hotel with vacancies surrounded by squabbling exhausted children is not my idea of a good time. Nor is spending the first hour of the day flipping through guidebooks or struggling with an inadequate internet connection in order to figure out where to go, how to get there, what it will cost, etc. only to find that the great museum we really wanted to go to is closed on Mondays or that there was a really great tour at the national park that took place yesterday.
Our friends the Brookses, who have extensively traveled the world with their FIVE kids, are the complete opposite of me in this regard. They are known for, among other things, arriving at the Copenhagen airport (yes, all seven of them) in the middle of the night with all their bikes disassembled in boxes, only then to realize that they hadn’t considered how they would get from the airport to their hotel. However, everything always works out and they have wonderful adventures, so there’s that.
Most trips that we take involve at least one spreadsheet. For our five-week cross country road trip a couple of years ago, I had everything planned to the letter. There were good reasons for this (i.e. in order to stay at several of the places that turned out to be highlights of the trip, campsites/accommodations had to be booked months in advance) and in the end it worked out wonderfully.
The Disney plan. Maybe spontaneity is not my strong suit?
I even had a spreadsheet for our trip to Disney a few years ago. I found a website that was like crack cocaine to an OCD planner such as myself, touringplans.com. It had reviews, crowd calendars, ratings on which park to visit each day, as well as extremely detailed suggested itineraries that would minimize standing in line (and which they obtained by exhaustive testing in the parks). Poring through this information and then synthesizing it into a schedule for us is the kind of thing I find fun. (I know! I’m a weirdo.)
In my defense, I am not rigid about these plans. I always told my family that we could choose to deviate from the Disney Plan at any time. I just like to have a plan, so that we’re not all standing around saying,
“What should we do next?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know, what do you want to do?”
…and then have all three kids inevitably pick different choices and proceed to fight bitterly over them.
But this time, due to the length and nature of the trip, I do want to allow us more flexibility to go where the wind takes us. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll have researched and documented a tentative general itinerary (of course). But I’m hoping to avoid locking us into it whenever possible. Time will tell whether this turns out to result in spontaneous bliss or endless headaches. (My guess is, a little bit of each.)