Vacation Planning--the Notebook

 I am a planner!  I love to have things organized and easy.  These pictures are of the notebook I put together for my Hawaii trip.  I like to have these for every big trip we take.  It helps me to have an itinerary and menus and maps and copies of reservations and ticket info. all in one notebook.  Now in our digital age I can access most of this online and so I now keep an electronic version for easy phone access, but I also like having a paper version handy just in case of poor cell service.  I am in the process of completing our current Disney notebook, so I am showing you my finished Hawaii one as an example for now.

 The first section is restaurants and menus.  What you can't see in the picture is the second page after each restaurant has a mapquest map from our hotel to the restaurant with "walking" directions.  We were on foot in Waikiki so I printed the walking maps.  After a few days we had a better feel for the area and didn't rely on the maps as much, but they were really helpful at first.

 I had a section for each of the days activities and maps that were relevant.  I also kept copies of reservations and payments and wesbite info and contact numbers for the various activities. It was really easy to see where we were going and what was planned for each day with this notebook.  As you can see it is super thick and used a lot of paper and ink, but I felt it was worth it!  I was able to schedule everything we wanted to do and we were never lost or confused while we were there.

I had a lot of maps!  A LOT!  I had a map to every destination and a map from every destination to the next until we returned to the hotel. It was great!  We were never lost or confused.  All of the time I spent in preparation really gave me a good sense of direction before we even arrived and while we were there I had a good idea of street names and positional directions (N,E,S,W) on the island.  I felt familiar with placement of our destination spots before even arriving.
To see the whole itinerary of what we saw and did go to this post:Aloha! Itinerary
For the menus pages, go to:Aloha! Restaurants
Both of these pages have links to websites with information.  You might find some fun things to plan for your own vacation!  They both show you examples of how I like to plan for vacations.