Planning Mode Activated!

Soooooo many things to prepare, so many situations to consider and so many decisions to make.

This section focuses on the preparation for our 6-month trip but most of it can be reused for any long trip.

In a nutshell, we want to go over the details of how we planned and prepared, not only for our trip, but also for our return home. Of course there are many ways to do this but we just wanted to share our process and we welcome any new advice!

Warning! I am going to get into my consulting work mindset, which involves a lot of notes, but I think it helps to write down the entire process, because during the long time it takes to prepare, there will be a lot of back and forth on decisions, itineraries, timing, things to do and so on.

We quickly started using 2 documents:

• a list of actions/to dos and when to complete them - my wife called it the anxiety inducing file....yes, the file is a looong list of things still to be done, but it feels good to see items being crossed out;

• a table of estimated costs by country and by category of costs - it helps to have an initial idea of the budget. In that same spreadsheet, we added indicators, such as, if the hotel/car/plane was booked and paid for. It helps to have a view of booked and paid amounts. Always use one currency but keep track of the amount in the original currency.

Of course, as you want to be able to share the document and access it from different platforms, store the documents and all the bookings in one single place in the cloud.

And last thing, having a password manager to keep all the passwords in one place, especially ones that you are not going to use for 6 months, is really helpful.

For a more detailed information, visit our Planning Your Trip page.