Trip Planning: How Do You Do It?

As the New Year bears down our upcoming cycle tour gets closer and closer. Yay for that!

Come January we are going to be hip deep in trip planning and figuring out all the things that we need to get done before getting on that plane on April 8th. There are itineraries to be figured out, gear to be decided on and found, and accommodation options to be researched. We’re definitely much looser in our trip planning than we used to be, but that doesn’t mean it can all be left to chance, or to the last minute; we have some work to do!!

It’s interesting trying to pull together an activity based trip; I don’t just want to know about travel in Luxembourg, I want to know specifically about cycling in Luxembourg. In fact I don’t just want to know about cycling in Luxembourg but also in its neighbouring countries of Belgium and France. It means searching for different sources of information and pulling it all together myself, or finding the Holy Grail in a source that discusses travel and cycling in Belgium, Luxembourg, and France (and Germany, and Poland, and…).

So I’m turning to:

• Guide books such as Lonely Planet and Frommers
• Big travel sites like TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree, and Boots’n’all
• Travel blogs – lots of searching for ‘cycle travel blog’, ‘cycle touring blog’, ‘cycle touring Europe blog’ and a bazillion other combinations
• Magazines – okay, really this is probably just a ploy to read the celebrity gossip magazines while perusing the magazine stand 🙂
• Friends and family – some of my friends have cycle toured, some have even blogged about it = great, personal resource!