Tips and Tricks for Travel

To undertake planning for multi-generational travel can be a daunting task. What teens, adults, and seniors want to do can vary widely. So how do you plan so the teens aren’t bored and the adults get to see the boring-to-a-teen things? Sometimes (most of the time), you don’t get to do it all.

First, buy the travel book. I go with Lonely Planet only because they lay things out the way my brain works and have a lot of options like a pocket guide for cities, road trips, specific islands. I have lots of time sitting around waiting for kids to finish baseball practice or have to get to games early and then have to wait until the games start or driving to out of state tournaments. I start marking it up including the recommended eats. The eats sometimes work out, sometimes don’t but it’s nice to have a meal time planned on some days.

I start with a spreadsheet that lays out the days on the top and the time on the side. Block your flights and travel times first. Next tab includes an options list – MUST DO, would be great, meh, and if we are bored. I link those to the website of the place to go and share this with everyone to go through when they get a chance. Last tab is a cost breakdown. We did this once without keeping track and it ended up in a “you all paid for too much, what do we owe you” and we had no idea so now I always keep track.

Tips:

1. Don’t book more than one tour in a day. It gets really hectic running around to one tour after another. It’s fine if it is a back-to-back thing at the same place like the Colosseum and the Roman Forum so you aren’t going back to one spot on multiple days.
2. Plan your days around a part of town or locations. Like in Paris, today is St. Germaine, tomorrow is Montmartre, etc. and then you can layout your transportation plan whether it’s public transportation or you are driving and parking.
3. Book your lodging central to your plan. We’ve been on the outskirts before because it was cheaper and we ended up spending an hour every day just getting to where we wanted to go. In Paris, we were on the Île de la Cité and it was great because we could always stop off at home and drop purchases, sit down for a second, get a shower if we didn’t get it in the morning due to some plan. Find the center even if it’s a little more. We tend to do AirBnB because it allows us all to be in the same place. One bathroom is never enough though. It will save massive headaches if you don’t have people waiting for showers or to pee.
4. Plan a few meals. Everything revolves around eating. If people are hangry, everything gets derailed. Sometimes it’s packing a lunch for everyone if we were planning on hiking to a beach in Hawaii. Sometimes, it’s a lunch spot that is recommended, that’s right between one thing and the next. Trying to plan meals on the fly can end up with everyone eating at tourist traps, overpriced food or being so far away from anything that everyone ends up at each other’s throats because everyone is starving.
5. Map your travel. Nothing is worse than trying to navigate on the fly. If you have a plan for the day, use google maps to map it and share the link to yourself or copy the link into your spreadsheet. I’ll be honest, this map is often changed on the fly but at least you have seen where things are on a map and in relation to each other.
6. Allow for downtime and down days. We are terrible at keeping to this but we do always make sure that the day after international travel is a down day. We learned this in Munich as we all fell asleep on the hop-on-hop-off bus the minute we sat down. It’s great to have a day in the middle that helps if some plan blows up or you want to make it back to something you missed.
7. Start your new destination with a city tour. We’ve done hop-on-hop-off but I don’t love them. In a landlocked city though, it’s a good option to get your bearings and make sure you see the things. It’s better to plan a city tour that is actually led by a guide and then you can head back if you saw something you didn’t know about or looks cooler than you imagined. In a city with a river or lake, we love these tours. Sometimes, all we had was a day to see everything so this was the plan for the day!
   A few we have loved:
   Lake Lucerne Panoramic Boat Tour*
   Best of Zurich Tour with Cable Car and Ferry* – unfortunately, it was a foggy day so we saw nothing from the cable car but we laughed about it anyway!
   Looks like our Amalfi Coast with Pompeii is no longer available but we jumped in a van from our hotel in Naples and hopped up the Amalfi coast with time to wander in each city, grab lunch in Sorrento, and then dropped off to a pre-booked guide at Pompeii. It was great! It was about $98/person in 2021.
8. Try some of the off-the-beaten-path or hidden gem tours! The one we did in Rome was a half-day tour where we saw things you would never stumble upon like the cannon that goes off everyday to set the clocks and sends all the church bells ringing. Plus, the haunted Tour or Ghost Tours are always a fun way to see the back corners of a city.
   A few we loved:
   Haunted Rome Ghost Tour – The Original
   Hidden Gems and Rome Catacombs* – we LOVED this one! And it allowed us to see the Appian Way which we probably wouldn’t have gotten out to otherwise.
   Cefalù’s hidden corners and legends tour with Ambra

I’m sure I have more tips and tricks but here is just the starting place as you take this kind of planning on!