Friday, February 22, 2013

UK 2013 part 11 - Terrors of Planning

The most terrifying thing about planning a trip - other than running out of money - is planning a trip that does not attend to the interests of the travelers.

I am here planning the trip and wondering "Is that what my husband wants to do?"

How can I ensure that all the travelers will be happy with the trip?

1- make a priority list.But that was already done. And the bad feelign was still there because there was way too much time left for me to fill out as I pleased.

2 - sit down with the traveler, discuss the proposed itinerary (places and activities), show possible alternatives and ask for possible alternatives.
Example - do you want to spend two days hiking in the Cotswolds? Do you want to spend the whole day walking in the Lake District or should we drive around as well? Do you wan to drive 3 hours at night to sleep over in the lake District or do we stay put and do the drive in the morning? Should we go crazy and do Scrubby, York, Liverpool in one day, or is there something you can give up on?

It turns out we are sleeping over at a friend's in the Liverpool area, and we cut York out of the trip.

3-try to make wise use of time.
Because this is a repeat trip, we have cut out a lot of stuff we don't have to do again, and we ended up with extra time to spend in each place.
Besides this trip is majorly about searching for ancestry - what if we don't find enough leads to fill out the allotted time for ancestry search? We will end up with more extra time.

Well, what to do with the extra time?

First of all this trip had to be built on flexibility, but not lack of organization.

I wanted to have back up itineraries and not just a vague idea of places we might go. I'd hate to spend the first 3 hours of my day trying to figure out what to do, just to find out it's too late.

So we created back up itineraries for Ireland and Scotland doing the sit down and discuss possibilities thing

This still left us with two whole day in the Cotswolds to plan for. We are still in the process of planning. But given it is just two days, out of originally 6, I feel much more at ease now.

I know what Dean wants, and I know how what I want can be met with that. We had to compromise very little to meet each other's wants, so I feel this is as close to ideal as possible.


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