OneNote as personal travel guide: Planning

In previous post we gathered and organized information about places we want to visit and we have now pretty good overview about what is where, how we can move around and what delicious things we want to try. It’s time now to make guiding plan for our trip, work out informative pages and share our travel guide with our friends.

Overview

Planning is also time consuming and also very tricky. If you plan too much things then you can be sure that only small part of your plan holds. If your planning is too small then you start losing time and possibly also money when on trip. So here we enter to troubled waters but this is mandatory step as otherwise we end up with complete chaos.

Here’s what we do here with our note book:

• add general information section and fill it,
• create informative pages about cities,
• share it with other people who come to travel.

Seems like piece of cake but it’s actually not so easy step and again it’s easier to also include your friends.

General information

General information will be the first section in your note book. We gather there all very important information so it is easily accessible to all travel crowd. Under general information goes the following information:

• schedule / time table,
• financial information,
• emergency information,
• contacts of your friends.

It actually depends a lot on the nature of your trip what pages you need.

Schedule

Schedule is most important page because if we don’t have it then we easily miss flights, trains and important events. Also with no schedule it’s way harder to make running changes to our plans when on the move.

Screenshot below shows how trip main schedule can be also two dates: coming and going with airplane. All days have their separate schedule. Often you don’t need schedule per day but it may happen if you go to some interesting country.

Don’t make schedule too long. It must be laconic but still point out most important times so people don’t get confused and stay on track.

Emergency information

Emergency information is also very important. If something unexpected happens to somebody we must be able to react quickly although we are not at home. Writing just 110 or 911 to this page is not enough. Police and ambulance may also need some other details and we must have a way how to effectively answer their questions.

It’s important that all people on trip have this information available.

Cities

For cities I usually create one page per city. I add there information about places. And if needed some pictures and maps.

Screenshot above shows part of my information page about Liberec. In the beginning of page I have some notes about how to get there and then chapters for some places come where plan to go with kids.

Attractions information

It’s possible you want to have more information about some objects. By example, history of castles, details of extraordinary exhibitions etc. You can talk to kids about interesting place you are going with them and show them pictures on train by example.

Screenshot above is example of information page for Sedlec ossuary in Kutna Hora, Czech – the famous bone ossuary. I keep the text in english as it’s easy for me to read and tell to kids the important and interesting facts.

Sharing

Of course, don’t forget sharing your notebook with friends who are also interested in trip planning. Working together on planning you get way better information and trip plan than doing everything on your own like I mostly have to do. And it’s also more fun.

Conslusion

Now you have ready to use travel guide in OneNote. It contains important information, trip schedule and information about destinations and places to visit. Also maps to hotels and emergency numbers. Now let day or two go without working on OneNote and then make your final review to your notebook. Usually you make only small modifications to notebook. And then you are ready to go – just wait for the last post in serie.