Planned Spontaneity
How do you plan a trip? No really, serious question. Do you know how to plan a five and a half month, multi country trip with a dog in tow? Anyone? Bugger.
I love a good plan. I’m never happier than at one of the (ahem) two whiteboards I have at home, plotting and planning. I’ll do it with anything really: Places to go, goals to achieve, jobs to take or not take, story ideas, five year plans. There’s really no problem in the world that can’t be solved with a white board and a pot of tea (leaders of the world, take note!)
Mr T is not much of a plotter. He likes to cruise around the interwebs looking for inspiration, meandering the halls and poking at things until, hey presto, the spirit moves him and he comes up with a genius idea. He writes nothing down, takes no notes, and doesn't even favourite things on the web browser for later. Annoyingly, he strikes gold more often than you might think with his wishy washy strategy. It gives me heart burn just thinking about it.
On the other hand, Mr T hates a white board. He’s not a massive fan of a written schedule either, and takes some serious coaxing to use a joint Google doc. So we’re off to a cracking start.
Here’s why I’m such a planner. I like an off-the-cuff moment as much as the next guy, but unless you have the mundane things already taken care of, you’ll miss all the good bits. This loosey goosey, go-with-the-flow approach some of the travel blogs recommend is not a strategy. It’s a meltdown waiting to happen.
You’re going to miss stuff if you don’t plan. There’s no way you can possibly immerse yourself in a spontaneous bongo drum session with local vegan artisans at the coolest beach in town, if you’re glued to your phone trying to figure out where to stay that night.
Or whatever. The point is you need a plan.
But how much of a plan is the question. Left to my own devices, I’d plan the hell out of the whole five months, but I’m trying to go a little more with the flow these days (no, really). Left to Mr T, we’d be drifting from town to town, living in the moment, and tasting as much wine as possible. Which is great until you have to sleep in the car. Plus we have the Wonderdog with us, and while Europe is very pet friendly, it does add another layer of consideration. And she will not sleep in a back alley, she's made that rather clear (I believe her exact words were “Do I look like a cat to you?)
We started at the beginning, with a perfectly normal conversation about where we wanted to go. Mr T wanted to define our route and then figure out the dates, I thought it made more sense to have the dates locked and then decide where we should go. I started to fidget a bit.
Then we started a Google doc for dumping ideas into, which soon became a sporadic list of nice places to stay and wineries to visit without any semblance of a plan. Time was ticking on. My teeth started to itch.
Then countries kept getting added. How east should go? How far south? Well if we’re going here, we should also go there. More places, more countries. I developed a twitch.
It wasn’t long before I could stand it no more. While Mr T was out working hard at his winery internship (Small Vines in Sebastopol since you asked), my inner planner came screaming out like a crazed banshee. The dog hid in the bedroom as I commandeered the spare room and got to work. By the time Mr T came home late that night, I was standing in the middle of a snow storm of paper and post-its with magic markers in both hands.
Me: <slightly wild eyed> “I think I’ve cracked it.”
There was a stunned silence. I expected this. It's hard not to be in awe of the plan when you first see it. I could tell he was impressed.
Mr T: “What. In. The. World…”
Me: “This is what we need. It’s a plan. It’s a great plan. GREAT PLAN. With a map and everything. Now we can SEE it, you see. In REAL LIFE!”
I may have been a little manic. There may have been some wine. Definitely no food. And those magic markers are crazy strong.
He was still staring.
Me: “So?”
Mr T: “Soooo…it looks like Carrie Mathison is planning our trip now?”
If you watch Homeland you’ll understand. I was rather flattered but something tells me it wasn’t meant as a compliment.
After I talked him through all of the colour coded post-its, showed him the new and improved Google research doc, as well as the full 'briefing book' with all of our confirmed plans and room for more, I could tell he was impressed. High fives all round.
And I have to say the combination of post-it plans and real life maps that you can see and touch won him over. It is incredibly useful and exhilarating. There’s something about posting, reposting, moving things around and tracing your finger along the map in real life that gets the juices flowing. Soon Mr T and I were sat in front of the big map chatting, scribbling, shuffling notes. It is, I can confirm, bloody good fun!
So if you’re after some early tips on how to plan a big trip, here’s what we’ve learned so far. It's not much, but it's something:
Accommodation: Airbnb is the way to go most of the time, in terms of range, choice, location, the lot. Yes I know you'd expect me to say that but it's true, especially if you have dogs, kids or you like your own kitchen. The range of listings in most of the places we’re visiting is excellent and we've found some really cool gems we'll show you along the way.
We’ve stuck to a semi strict criteria in selecting the listings. First, we search to find cool villages or towns close to places we want to visit. Then we start to narrow down on the Airbnb app. We always book an entire place. We only book places with 5 star reviews (no compromises). I look through all of the reviews and wheedle out the overly nice ones and the overly critical ones (mentioning no nationalities here!) to try and get a better sense for the good and the bad. We're also trying to stick to a budget but neither of us are any good at that so we're hoping to get better. I’ll let you know how our strategy works out in practice but I’m hopeful.
Transport: If you’re doing a big trip and you want a car, there’s an affordable option out there. We were torn on what to do. We didn’t want to buy a left hand drive car for our trip only to need a right hand drive in the UK when we’re done. And we definitely didn’t want to drive a right hand drive car around for five months on the “wrong” side of the road. One way ticket to hospital/a nervous breakdown/divorce. So we did a long term lease through Auto Europe and we got a brand new (as in right off the factory floor) Peugeot 5008 with unlimited mileage and full insurance, which nets out to around USD$35 a day. Pretty good deal if you don’t want to hassle of buying a used car and then trying to offload it again at the end of your trip.
Where to go: We’ve taken a bit of a layered approach to things. First layer is to get the first half of the trip accommodation booked. We decided to avoid big cities and towns and instead opt for smaller towns and villages wherever possible. One rule of thumb: trying to make sure we had no more than 3 hrs of driving per day. So we’d look for the best villages within that radius. Then on top of that we are adding recommendations for friends, the internet and other sources.
We decided to not plan the second part of the trip until further down the track, just in case we have a change of plan or are run ragged and want to take it a bit slower. So everything after the Amalfi Coast (which books up a year in advance, you have been warned) is currently unplanned. I’m trying my best not to twitch.
So that’s our starting point. We have way, way more to do and not that much more time to do it. Speaking of which, I’d better get my ass in gear. Where’s that marker pen?
