Planning, Planning & More Planning

So as I mentioned in my introduction, this blog will first, and foremost, focus on the wonderful trip we took to London & Paris in July 2013. Let me start off by explaining something, I'm the textbook Type A personality. If I'm planning something I'm going to be obsessive over the smallest details, which can make for a little more stress than usual, however I knew once we left everything was in order for the best time of our lives. That being said, let's move on to the planning!

Oh the Brit lifestyle...

Many people ask us why we choose London as our destination, and I honestly can't say exactly why. One(Remember this thought of mine a couple posts from now.) Once we decided on Europe we just had to nail down where within that beautiful continent we wanted to visit. I'll admit this, we are a couple of chickens because a main concern was the language barrier. We had never been overseas, and I'd only gone to Mexico, so we wanted to make sure we could communicate well where ever we went. This narrowed our options significantly and finally landed on London! 
thing I know is, I have always been fascinated with the British; High tea, royalty, castles, and who can resist those British accents! Am I the only one who can't help but have a grin from ear to ear when I hear a Brit talking? (You can imagine what I looked like walking around in London right?) My husband and I threw around the idea of cruises in tropical locations or becoming beach bums for a week in Hawaii or Mexico but then I thought "Why not Europe? Who says you have to go someplace hot & sunny for vacation?"

Planning a week long trip can seem daunting to say the least, but let me tell you, it's not as scary as it seems. My first tip is GOOGLE IT (if you're into Bing that's alright, I won't hold it against you). It may seem obvious, but as most of my friends and family know, I'm a huge Google girl. It's really not that hard, type in your destination and nearly any major city, state/region, or country will have a tourism site. We went through and made a list from multiple websites including anything we thought sounded semi-interesting. Remember, once you say "Oh that looks fun!" it doesn't mean that you are locked in to doing it. Once we had our list made we researched it more. We looked at everything about the attractions on our list; where it was, how long it may take to see it, the COST, special sites within the attraction, and then from there decided whether or not it would make our final list. As you can imagine our original list was MASSIVE! 

Just a couple things to see right?

We spent quite some time making what we thought was going to be our final list of attractions in London. Little did we know at that time, we were a bit naive about how many things you can see in a week. Don't get me wrong, we saw a lot, but we definitely didn't get all that we wanted in. Second tip, be willing to compromise. Yeah you can see Big Ben, Westminster, Changing of the Guard, tour Buckingham Palace, go on the London Eye, tour Parliament and tour St Paul's Cathedral in one day, but do you want to have more than 5 minutes at each place? I'm sure this isn't the first time you've read "Quality over Quantity," and I can't agree more. I still feel like we overdid it a bit going from attraction to attraction and it took a couple days in London to slow down and enjoy the daily life that was happening around us. When you start planning, be realistic about the time you want to take at certain places. If you're a photo-fanatic, like myself, you better allot a little bit extra time, I was shocked at how much time I spent snapping pictures of amazing architectural details, animals (15 minutes or so alone on the ravens at the Tour of London), and of ourselves. 

What to do next? Okay, here's where my Type A-ness kicks in because I'm smiling from ear to ear just while writing this...spreadsheet time! I love spreadsheets, everything about them screams order and organization, I just love them. It's sick I know, but it's how I am. Now I know there's plenty of "wing it" travelers out there, but I'm not one of them. Below you can see part of my spreadsheet, I broke it down with the days across the top and times in half hour slots down the side. Remember, this picture is after months of tweaking and adjusting our plans for our dream vacation, so this isn't what your's will look like from the get go. Trust me, still saved on my computer, I have about 4 or 5 different itineraries saved just for reference on changes I had already made. Stick with it and don't get discouraged because this was our saving grace while we were over there. As you can see, I left huge blocks of time for things, but it was a good thing because although I had planned for travel time in between locations, there were times that this ran over. FYI: Taking the tube from Heathrow to King's Cross on the Piccadilly Line takes an hour...not fun after an already exhausting 12 hours of flying over an entire day, pay the extra money and take the Heathrow Express (more on that later).  

Again...I warned you about the Type A bit.

Well, I'm sure your brains are mush about now, so I bid you farewell for now and will continue this planning bit tomorrow. And remember...

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.

Mike & Alicia