This summer we enjoyed an amazing once in a lifetime road trip to the Grand Canyon and home. This post is the second in a series for my readers to help take the anxiety out of a major road trip or vacation with your family. The first post covered finances, how you can save and afford your trip on any budget. Today I am going to talk about planning, from when to take your vacation to when is the best time for your family.
Each family is going to be different when it comes to planning your trip. We have a number of factors in our planning process. We have a wide range of ages with our kids, our oldest is 17 and going into her senior year in high school, our youngest is 8! All three of our kids hate to miss school for an extended period of time, they love going, they work hard and make great grades. School year trips are always out for us, no matter what!
“It takes real planning to organize this kind of chaos.” – Mel Odom
Secondly, my husband being a fire fighter is only given so many days vacation during the year, and a lot of times we are given those days, we don’t select them. This vacation picking process goes on in December so we know by January 1 what days we have. We then sit down and plan our entire year! From weekend trips, to kids activities to large vacations like this road trip.
We have been talking about this road trip vacation for years. We wanted to take our kids, make it a bonding time before our oldest went away to college. Our time was running out! Our youngest was old enough to enjoy every minute of it, and he will remember this forever! This time in our lives was the perfect time for us to take this cross country trip and enjoy it!
So now you know where you want to go, when you want to go and so now you need to plan. We’ve already talked about planning your finances and being prepared. You need to plan everything! How are you going to eat? I mentioned in the previous post how we save money on food, but this needs to be part of the process of planning. Think about how much you want to spend on food, on lodging, on entertainment. How many days will it take you to get there? How many days are you going to spend exploring? Driving home? Stops on the way? This is all the process of planning. There should not be a single part of your trip not thought about, this will eliminate any anxiety!
Leading up to our trip I have lists everywhere! I have packing lists (numerous ones! This is another post!), I have lists for everything!
I have 3 kids and we have done a lot of traveling over the years. It’s something my husband and I enjoy doing with them. Because of this my kids have become a part of everything we do. They sit with us and plan every part of the trip, they are part of the packing and they have grown up doing this. Because we have included them, over the years our trips have become a little easier. And we are hoping that they will share in the joy of vacationing and road tripping with their kids in the future!
“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
So far we have covered saving money and affording a large trip for your family here. And now we have covered when you should plan this. Maybe it’s not in the next few months, maybe it’s a few years down the road. That’s ok! Put it on your calendar and look forward to it. Talk about it, plan it and get excited. Make sure you plan the trip when your kids are old enough to enjoy it! There were so many young kids and babies at the Grand Canyon. We could never of done that! We don’t have the money to trip there a number of times in our kids lives, so we wanted to make sure all 3 of them were old enough to enjoy and remember. We needed to have the finances to enjoy the trip, so we needed to plan it far enough in advance to save the money we needed.
There’s a lot of factors to take into consideration when planning any type of vacation. Each family is going to be different with different factors to consider. Think hard and stay organized, that’s the most important part. Communication with your significant other, with your family will help you plan the best vacation ever! Enjoy, and share with me where you are planning to go!
