Getting Ready for the Next Adventure

I’m aware that my posts have tailed off a bit recently.
I was in a nice routine while we were on our adventure in Europe posting on Tuesday and Friday but having finished our trip in Amsterdam, life has become incredibly hectic preparing for our next adventure…….

Outline:
We fly into Chicago on June 9th and have a full week to explore all the “windy city” has to offer before picking up our rental car and heading out onto Route 66. With a couple of diversions to see Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas we hopefully will arrive in Los Angeles four weeks later.
Then we fly down to Fort Lauderdale for a week of recuperation and relaxation before picking up our second rental car and heading up the East Coast of America. We drop our car off in Richmond, Virginia three weeks later and will be using the Amtrak train network to Washington, Philadelphia and finally New York before flying home in early September.

Making Plans:
Our trip to Chicago and out onto Route 66 was a dream that was created back in 2019 when we planned to get married in 2020 and decided this would make a great honeymoon for two midlife adventurers.

I had researched Route 66 utilising the following books:
Brits on Route 66 written by Vicki Graves
Billy Connolly’s Route 66
Lonely Planet Route 66 Road Trips
EZ66 -Route 66 Guide for Travellers by Jerry McClanahan
Dining and Lodging Guide to Route 66 printed by the National Historic Route 66 Federation

We had also watched the series that Billy Connolly, the comedian, had made on DVD about his adventure along Route 66 and also another series made about the same trip by “The Hairy Bikers” -two famous chefs from the UK.
Armed also with the Rand McNally Road Atlas of America, my normal on line planning website and my proverbial travel notebook I planned the trip including things to see, places to stay and some suggestions of where to eat.

Alas the wedding was postponed due to Covid and the honeymoon cancelled.
Having rebooked our wedding for 2021 I set it all up again but again Covid caused a postponement. I seriously could not muster the energy to rebook it all alongside our long awaited wedding for 2022 and thus it was shelved until this year.
We had been looking for a way to celebrate our “big birthdays” and this was how the European tour had evolved followed by Route 66.
Unfortunately Covid caused some places of interest, accommodation and eateries to close and so the “off the shelf” package I had sat waiting for me had to be altered but by the time we embarked on our European tour everything was in place for this to follow on.

We then, maybe crazily, decided to extend our American adventure to take in the East Coast. Whilst half of this was planned prior to leaving for Europe there was still stuff left to do whilst we were there.

Planning trips is something I’ve been doing since 1999 but it takes time to do it properly and, therefore, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Also as I said in my last post ” Lessons Learnt on our European Adventure” it’s important to learn from our travels so we can continuously improve our enjoyment of them. Some places of interest have been taken out and accommodation, particularly Air BnB places, have been re-examined to check they meet our needs.

Budget:
When you go on holiday, whether it is a package tour or a self planned trip the majority of folk have an amount of money they can spend which somewhat dictates where they can go, for how long and often what type of accommodation they will stay in.
This is is even more important when you are travelling. If you run out of money the likelihood is you are going to have to come home sooner than you anticipated.
To this end I have a habit of keeping spreadsheets to budget in advance of leaving the cost of my top three items which are transportation (flights, car hire, train fares etc), accommodation and daily expenditure.

Not forgetting arrangements to and from our UK airport. We nearly missed a flight a few years back due to a bad accident on the M4 which leads into London and meets with the M25 at junction 4B which takes us to Heathrow. Nowadays we don’t take chances and often book accommodation at the airport the night before.
Also in terms of travelling to the airport you can usually find some deal for car parking if you are heading off for a couple of weeks but when you want to go for extended periods you have to rethink this process and budget in for actually getting there and back without a car.

En route I like to keep this budget up to date with our actual expenditure. In Europe we calculated this every time we were about to leave a city so we could see how we were fairing. Don’t get me wrong we have credit cards on us but unlike when we were both working we are no longer in a financial position to arrive home and then have to pay off a massive bill.

Once completed these figures can also guide us, in future, in terms of estimating how much we need to budget per day depending upon the type of place we are visiting. For example large cities including capital cities are always more expensive than outlying regions. This is also where you are likely to find most of the key attractions on your trip.

This might all seem a bit “serious” but it gives me peace of mind now we are both retired. We still enjoy ourselves but we are mindful of the fact we are no longer going on holiday but travelling. A holiday is something you do maybe once a year for a couple of weeks but we are setting off on an adventure that in America will be for 85 days.

Packing:
I am old enough to remember the days when there was no limit on the weight of your suitcase! I took my first trip as a single Mum to Fuerteventura when my son was three and my daughter about eighteen months. My two suitcases were laden with not just clothes for the three of us but some toys, nappies, baby formula, bottles and six hard back books for me!
I had a bottle steriliser, at the time, and believe me if I could have fitted it in a suitcase I would have done. The idea of having to sterilise them in a pan of boiling water didn’t enthral me!
However I managed and over the next thirteen years we took many trips together and until the weight limits were introduced I brought all manner of mementoes back with me including two porcelain lamp shades from Spain!

These days everything is different as 23kg is the normal weight limit in the UK if you are flying off abroad. I have to say the European adventure tested my skills in this area as we needed to take layered clothing as the weather was likely to range from five degrees up to thirty degrees.
I’ve learnt to limit footwear particularly with Phil. He loves trainers and has quite the collection at home and would literally take a pair to match every outfit if he could but he managed in Europe with a black pair, a white pair and a pair he travelled in!

I have also always taken a first aid kit. Phil makes fun of me about it but again in Europe, after he had persuaded me to minimise the contents, we came unstuck. I’m not saying that paracetamol and cold and flu remedies, for example, are not available on the continent but they are seriously more expensive than England!
We can buy paracetamol, for example, from Lidl for less than £1 a packet. In Europe we were paying at least double that. Cold and flu tablets in the UK can be purchased from Lidl for about £1.60 whereas in Europe we were paying six times that amount!
It was the same for toiletries. The same bottle of shower gel in Europe was at least twice the price it is in the UK.
Toiletries do add to the weight, however, so it is a case of balancing everything to ensure we don’t go over on our weight limit whilst also not incurring additional expenditure whilst we are away on items that are expensive abroad.

Everyone packs differently and I’ve tried a few different ideas that I’ve read about on line. For example I can’t get on with packing cubes. I find they take up more room than packing individually, maybe I’m doing something wrong. They are useful I guess when you unpack at your destination as you can just pop them directly in a drawer and all your socks , for example, are in one place in their own cube. But if, like us, you are moving around a lot they don’t have the same benefit. I only unpack what I need for that particular destination. The rest stays in the suitcase.

One of my absolute stay safe methods is not to pack for us individually. We take two suitcases currently one red and one blue. In my head the red suitcase is number one and the blue suitcase is number two. Each suitcase contains everything we need for a seven day period. In this way if ever the airline loses a suitcase en route we have enough clothes, toiletries etc for a week until hopefully the second suitcase appears.
Additionally when you are travelling you only have to open one suitcase at each destination until seven days have expired. If we are using car hire I quite often leave the second suitcase, that I’m not currently using, locked in the boot of the car rather than lugging it into every single accommodation. After seven days we then swap to the other suitcase.

When I am travelling I try and ensure, when securing accommodation, that we have a washer and a dryer at fairly regular intervals. This way I can wash the clothes from the suitcase we have used whilst wearing the clothes from the second suitcase.

I fully understand that travellers with rucksacks who are basically carrying all their worldly possessions on their backs would be laughing now at my strategic planning but we are no longer youngsters and whilst we enjoy travelling we don’t really want to rough it.

The amount of clothes we take, as previously mentioned, varies depending upon the destination. If we are going to a hot climate and living in shorts and t-shirts we can pack more changes of clothes than if we are going to a colder climate where jeans, jumpers and sweatshirts are the order of the day.
I also pay attention to the description of the accommodation regarding towels being available and for summer resorts- beach towels. Again these can take up extra weight if we need to include them.
I have to be honest though the provision of toiletries and a hairdryer at accommodation is wasted on me because I like my own hairdryer and can only use certain shower gels and shampoos.
The final point I would make which has again only just sunk in with Phil is I also make sure I have some room to bring gifts and mementoes home. It’s no good ignoring this because when you do, you can land up spending money at the departure airport for excess baggage. Weirdly I’ve often found the airlines are more strict with your excess when you return to the UK than when you leave.

Whatever I am packing there has to be a packing list. I’ve always had one since the children were small mainly so I didn’t forget something they might need, wanted to take or which I could easily leave behind when departing. Now it’s more about my forgetful menopausal mind!

Hand Luggage:
Our hand luggage is always two rucksacks complete with any IT equipment, cameras or other valuables that we wouldn’t want to go into the airport baggage system in case they never came back.
I used to print off every piece of paper needed for each journey for example pre booked tickets, airline boarding passes etc but I’ve started to finally trust my iPhone and keep all the information on this. However this is only because I also carry my iPad and/or Mac with me which can act as back up.

Last year we met a couple of Irish ladies on the Greek Islands who had all their information on one iPhone which unfortunately then got left on the aircraft. This caused them no end of issues when trying to sort out their various ferry and accommodation bookings. It’s a stress I can definitely do without.

The one item I still print, which my son finds amusing, is the complete itinerary of a trip from my on line planner. It just makes it so much easier when there are two of you needing access to what we are doing tomorrow or where we are driving to next. It also means we always have somewhere to write notes and we often just detach today’s sheet and include it with our day sack or in the car. In the European cities it became a useful quick referral for detailing how to get to certain destinations if we were using public transport.

There is a huge reliance upon mobile phones these days but we found on our last adventure when using them constantly for mapping, audio guides, photo taking etc that batteries can deplete and not necessarily last if you are out for a long period of time.
With a lot of attractions requiring timed entry tickets and not accepting these on paper we found ourselves being ever mindful of battery life.
To remedy this on our next adventure we have invested in a portable double charging pack.

With a week to go until we set off again my to do list thankfully shortens by the day, my packing will be complete this weekend and America is on the horizon.