trip planning – Keeping it creative

This month, we’re finally going on our long awaited holiday to Vienna in Austria. It was originally planned for August 2020 but in March of that year, obviously COVID-19 hit and our flights were cancelled. My husband re-arranged for May 2021 but restrictions were still in place, so we made the decision to wait for another year. Everything is now booked (including an overnight stay in a hotel in Manchester as our flight is from there) and during the last month we have again started to think about what we’re going to take with us in the hold and in our hand luggage and what we want to see and do over the 5 days.

As we were making our plans, I decided it would be nice to create scrapbook style spreads with photographs of our hotel, plus must visit locations including parks, buildings and attractions. I’ve not finished all of my travel planning spreads yet but I’m making good progress and I’m happy with everything I’ve done so far.

My cover page

After printing mini photographs on my Canon Selphy printer, I chose 5 of them to include on the front cover. Whilst searching through my journalling supplies, I found a small travel themed sticker book with mini word and icon stickers plus some tiny hearts to fill in the spaces. I also treated myself to some new washi tapes from Stationery Pal and they arrived just in time for me to use one of them in my spreads.

Photo credit: Laura Jones for Keeping It Creative

Monthly calendar

I’ve gone back to the slightly larger boxes for this month so I have plenty of room to record my university work, fitness classes and travel plans. Again, I’ve included mini photos of popular places in Vienna to visit and then filled in the spaces with more of the little stickers from by booklet. I didn’t really come up with a colour scheme but I wanted to go for different shades of blue to match with the bright blue skies in some of the photos.

May finances

I’m sure we’ll be spending lots in May with all the bank holidays and our trip do I’ve made my expenses section a little bigger than last month. I decided to include a photograph of the amazing rooftop bar in our hotel as I reckon we’ll be spending time and money there relaxing with a cocktail or two!

Travel information spreads

I want us to be super prepared for our trip as it helps to keep travel anxiety at bay. The booking information is all in various emails so I asked my husband to forward everything to me so I could add everything to my bullet journal. I understand why everything is done electronically now but I used to like paper copies so that I could stick things into my Traveller’s notebook as part of my scrapbooking.

So far, I’ve got our Manchester hotel booking information, the outbound and return flight details and our hotel booking information for Vienna. I’ve also written details of the train we can catch from airport and the stations we can alight at. I’ve pixelated the specifics for privacy reasons!

On the next page, I’ve included a map of Europe which shows Sunderland to Manchester (as the crow flies!) and the route from Manchester Airport to Vienna International Airport. It was also good to learn more about the countries which border Austria too. The ink I used for the stamping is Stazon which claims to allow you to use it on any surface so I tried it out on the top of one of my grid washis and it printed and dried really well.

Over the page, I’ve listed the must see and must visit places on a double page spread. This has helped me to create an itinerary for the first full day we are there.

The next spread I have planned is a list of veggie / vegan cafes and restaurants which we might go to. I’ve tried looking at the menus for various places but most of them seem to be in German. I hope they have English menus as well as I can only speak / read about five words and none of them are food names.

My final travel spread will be my comprehensive packing list. I always do one of these no matter where we are headed and for how long as it ensures I remember everything and helps me to stay calm during the packing process. In the past, sorting everything out for a trip has made me really stressed out so I now do whatever I can to make the process easier and less fraught. Does anyone else find packing and organising for a holiday stressful?

Final words…

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing my spreads for this month and that they’ve given you some ideas for travel planning and preparation. Obviously, for privacy reasons, I haven’t shown the exact dates for our trip or any specifics related to our journey or accommodation but I’m sure you get the idea and I may share my filled in pages on social media when we return.

Wishing you a wonderful May, whatever your plans are for the month,

My husband and I were meant to be going to Vienna in Austria in August of this year but we’ve made the decision to postpone our trip until 2021 as the restrictions in place due to Coronavirus are likely to spoil our holiday somewhat. However, I refuse to get upset about it and instead I’m keeping myself excited and doing some extra preparation for when we eventually get there. In today’s Monday Matters post, I’m going to share some of the ways that I’m keeping the excitement going so that I’m still really looking forward to our trip. Hopefully, this will give you some ways to minimise the disappointment you may be feeling if your plans have been put on hold for the time being.

Checking out Pinterest

I’ve recently created a Pinterest board called ‘Vienna Trip‘ and pinned lots of ‘best things to do in Vienna’ ideas plus information about the city in general. This is great for keeping all the webpages in one place and it will help me to create planning spreads in my BuJo nearer the time.

Vienna Photo collage Bullet Journal Spread

Whilst visiting various Vienna related pages on the web, I came across lots of stunning photographs of places within the city. I saved mini versions of these on my computer and have printed them off on photograph paper to create a two page collage for my bullet journal. I typed out the names of the places using MS Word and my favourite font of the moment which is Tox typewriter. I used Pritt stick to attach everything as the double sided tape that I have takes ages when you have lots of little fiddly bits and pieces to stick on.

Educating myself about the country

This is something I used to do with the children in my class when I was teaching. We would do a mini geography topic based on a particular place and learn everything we could about it including where it was in the World, the capital city and other popular tourist spots, the flag, traditions, weather, food etc. The information collected would then be used to create a fact file either electronically in our ICT lessons or in our topic books. I’ve been doing the same sort of research to create a spread in my bullet journal. I typed in search terms such as ‘Austria facts for kids’ etc into Google as I only wanted to know the basics and this made an easy starting point for further research. This website was a gold mine of information and has stuff on other countries too.

Before creating my BuJo spread, I set up an MS Word document in which to put random information about the country in no particular order. This helped me to decide on the sections and headers I would need for my bullet journal so I could make it as well organised and logical as possible.

Immersing myself virtually

There are some amazing views in Austria as I discovered during my research online. I’m not sure how much of the wonderful scenery we’ll get to see with us being in the city so I’ve chosen a stunning view for the desktop of my computer and I’ve stuck some beautiful photographs in my BuJo of some of the images I found. And according to Lee Bacon, head of digital at the BBC’s Natural History Unit, “Even viewing nature digitally has been scientifically proven to help peoples’ mental wellbeing” so yay for Google images!

Learning about the city

I usually do most of my reading about the city we are going to on the aeroplane on the way over or in a mad rush a few days before we travel. This time, I’m going to be super well prepared about the layout of Vienna and what to expect when we get there. This will help us make the most of our time as we will know how spaced out everything is and how we can travel around the place on foot or using different transport systems. So far I’ve done one page but I shall be continuing to add information each week until I have everything I want written down. By the time we go on our trip, I’ll have moved into a new BuJo but I can photocopy my pages to take with us.

I found a great site that has comprehensive descriptions on the various tourist attractions and also has a number of maps that you can download as PDFs. I printed one today on sticker paper, backed it onto some coloured paper and then laminated it. Now I just need to find somewhere to keep it until next year so we actually remember to take it with us.

What about a pre-trip virtual tour?

Whilst checking out a variety of websites, I came across this site which enables you to preview different sights around the city. It’s really useful for photographs of the different tourist activities and you can look on a map to see where things are located. I expect there are similar websites for other cities across the world too. I know Sunderland have created virtual tours of popular places across the city for people to view during lockdown.

Checking out the eateries using Happy Cow

My husband and I are both vegetarian and I’m particularly strict about what I eat too. I need to be sure that if I eat cheese, it doesn’t contain animal rennet and I also like my drinks to be veggie friendly too (vegan if possible). Therefore, when we go abroad, we choose to eat in vegetarian or vegan eateries, as unlike in the UK, cafes and restaurants don’t usually label their dishes with a V or Ve symbol. Before we go anywhere, we do extensive research on Happy Cow. I actually chose Vienna for our holiday as I know that vegetarians and vegans are well catered for there. I haven’t created a bullet journal spread of places to eat at yet but this is definitely something I intend to do nearer the time. The information will include if the café or restaurant is completely vegan or veggie with vegan options and I’ll also add the location and how far away it is from our hotel. As you can see, there are plenty of options for our stay!

Final thoughts

I know the lockdown and coronavirus have caused so much worry, disappointment, anxiety and general upset, but hopefully this post has given you some ideas on how to keep the pre-holiday or trip excitement going for a while longer. Obviously, re-arranging travel dates and accommodation present their own difficulties but once things have been sorted out, you can hopefully do some extra planning to ensure when you do eventually get away, you have the best time ever!

Tag: trip planning

Setting up my Bullet Journal for May 2023: Travel theme

Monday Matters: How I’m keeping the pre-holiday excitement going despite our trip being postponed until next year