Travel Notes

When I used to travel, I used to make hand-written notes before the trip, during the trip and after the trip.  I am looking at some of my travel notes now and it is so nice to see my own writing, my own highlighting, my own cross-offs.

In my last one-week road trip outside of Canada, I made the following pre-planning notes:

- cover page with only departure date, return date and flight information
- hotel information such as hotels' name, locations (including GPS plot points), telephone numbers and distances/hours from the approaching locations, check-in/check-out times
- directions in point form with the most crucial part of the instructions (supplemented with printed directions which have been recycled long ago)
- things to do page listing all the potential stuff to do in all travel areas plus one must try restaurant
- Outline of each day which contains very little information
- potential gift/souvenirs

I noticed that I put "Wing it !!)" at the end of one of the pre-planning page notes

Following the pre-planning notes, I now have my travel notes.

The first travel note is a journal entry.  I excitedly wrote about whatever is happening at the moment.  For example, my first paragraph of Day 1 is me stating that I am on route to the connecting airport at 4:20 p.m.  Obviously, something unexpected happened that's why it's in my note.

I probably had some time to kill so following my Day one notes, I wrote about my new year's resolution which had a list of 8 things.  I guess I accomplished 3/8 of the things listed LOL.

I am guessing I wrote my resolution list on the airplane because the following page is me saying I have arrived at my destination airport where I have some travel errands to run (like getting our car rental).  We ended the day at the "must try" restaurant.

Next page is Day 1 again, I guess this is Day 1 of travel at the destination area instead of Day 1 of travel to the airport.  I listed out the names of all the places I went to on Day 1 and Douglas, a truck driver who gave us directions.

Day 2 travel entry page is about the same, this time Ronan helped with direction and made a joke.

Day 3 & 4 travel page is about the same but something unexpected happened on Day 3 and 4 that required quick action and sound judgment. I ended this entry praising myself on how I handled the situation.

After that, I wrote a list of people who helped us along our travels.  There were at least 12 people.  #6, in particular, was a prankster and said we were 200 miles from our destination when we were actually much much closer than that.

The last page is probably a list of places I wanted to visit but didn't end up going.

So remember to keep your own travel notes!

One thing I failed to mention on my note was that everyone who tried to help us at the gas station to locate the gas tank open button had difficulties finding such button.  It's funny.  Usually getting gas is pretty simple but when you are driving an unfamiliar vehicle, you can't even locate the gas tank open button.  We were there for a good 20 minutes just looking for that button so we can fill up the tank.