Travel Planning- A Tip from the Lady of Redwoodshire

Our Babymoon in Costa Rica

The more you travel, the better you get at it. Traveling is an extremely fun thing to do.  But with any good thing in life, it takes a little planning and preparation.  There are two ends of the spectrum when it comes to planning a trip- some people like to go with the flow and see what happens... and others like to have an hour-by-hour itinerary for each day.  I like to think that a balanced combination of the two, make for the best kind of adventure.  If you don't plan anything in advance, you end up spending more time trying to figure out what you will do with your day, than getting to experience all there is to experience in the new place your in.  Precious time gets wasted.  On the other hand,  when you have every last detail planned out, it may get complicated when something does not go as planned- and if you're the type to have time planned down to the hour, then you may not deal well with those unexpected changes.

The Laird and I both love to travel.  Between us, we've travelled to China (twice), the Philippines, Mexico (three times), England, Spain, Costa Rica (twice), Aruba, Peru, & Canada.  Some of those trips together and some on our own.  In the past, we preferred international travel, but a couple years ago our West Coast Road Trip opened our eyes to the fun of domestic travel as well.

The Honeymoon was the first trip we would plan and take together.  We had so much to learn about planning a fun trip on our own- as previous trips were planned and organized by other people.  It can be quite overwhelming to decide where to go.... then where to stay... and ultimately what to do.  Where to go?  We usually don't have too much trouble with this decision.  What to do?  Not too difficult either.  Where to stay?  Now this is where our work starts.

When picking out a place to stay for our Honeymoon, we had a list of 30+ places to choose from.  As we checked out the websites of different places, we quickly narrowed the list down.  Then we discovered 2 tools that we have used for every trip we've planned since then:  Trip Advisor reviews & Flickr.

Trip Advisor:  Ranks each hotel in the area by different criteria; overall, price, etc.  Guest Reviews- they are actually so helpful and often very current.  They can be quite funny too!   Reading people's personal experiences can be extremely helpful in imagining if it fits what you're looking for.  A link to the hotel website is often provided as well.  The site provides both professional and personal photos that people post.  Not only does it offer information about places to stay, but also provides popular activities and places to eat (also ranked).

Flickr:  One thing that was often mentioned in reviews of the resort we liked, were these sandbags on the beach.  Considering it was our honeymoon, we weren't sure how we felt about having tacky sandbags cluttering the beach we'd be swimming on.  Some people complained in their reviews.  Some were indifferent, and others never mentioned them.  That is when we discovered that we could search people's personal photos within Flickr,  from their stay at this particular resort.  And low and behold, we actually did find some photos of those sandbags. Check out this El Dorado Royale sandbags photo. Who would have thought to check Flickr?!  Needless to say, we did spend our honeymoon at that resort, and quite enjoyed the sandbags on the beach.  They formed a great little place for snorkeling and seeing fish.  Nowadays, we generally don't use flickr for planning our trips, but has been a great secondary search tool when we want to see real people's photos.

The Laird & I with a baby
white faced monkey @ Proyecto Asis

Depending on what type of trip you are planning will influence how much importance you place on where you stay.  For our honeymoon, we wanted to relax somewhere nice.  We would only ever have one honeymoon, so we wanted to make it a great one.  However since that trip, we have placed far less emphasis on needing the place to be "just right".  We use Trip Advisor as more of an activity guide to finding adventures off the beaten path.  On our recent trip to Costa Rica, my favorite thing we did was visit Proyecto Asis.  It was ranked very highly on Trip Advisor, so we decided to follow the reviews and check it out for ourselves.  And like the reviews post, it really was a wonderful experience visiting the animals up close and learning about the center.

If you're planning a vacation or honeymoon and want a little more information than the brochure guides offer, check out Trip Advisor & Flickr!