How to Make Traveling Easy

In 2022 on another trip across the state to watch our foster son play football we came up with a plan…Our main goal? We wanted to travel more! With and without our kids. So then we started brain storming and this is what we came up with to make traveling easy:

Travel Binder 2022 !

This travel binder organized all our thoughts and made our dreams of traveling more a reality!

We had layers of things we wanted to achieve:

1. Visit 40 (YES, 40) cities in 1 year!
2. Visit 40 U.S. cities in 1 year. We wanted to travel more but we realized there’s so many places in our own country we haven’t seen, that we should probably start there. (anddd it’s more affordable/practical/weekend trips/kid friendly).
3. Make a plan so we actually follow through with this goal. Because I don’t know about you but I really struggle with all the other mom tasks I have going to try something new and stick to it!

Let me guess.. you’re thinking crazy, I know. We knew it was ambitious then but, we figured why not try? 

*Update* we did not make it to 40 cities but we had so much fun trying!

After our initial goals were outlined we made a list of the top 40 cities in the U.S. we wanted to visit. 

Then I started organizing!!!!! Woohoo! So here’s the great news for you! I have all my hard work put together in a nice little binder for you to use! *You’re welcome* 😉 it’s totally customizable but gives you a goals page, spreadsheet and all the different sections I used to plan and travel as much as possible.

Side note, if you think this still sounds crazy, you’re right! It does! Especially with three boys in elementary school who play a lot of sports! Whew the planning has to be exact but flexible…when do you book an Airbnb or hotel? Do you fly or drive? How much time do you have? All good questions!

First Things First

We first decided to open a southwest credit card and a Marriott credit card. *I don’t recommend this unless you are confident you can pay your credit card off every month. We decided to put regular monthly expenses between the two cards to reap the benefits of points for flights and hotels! This was super beneficial for us but its not for everyone.

Next we grouped cities together that we could maybe see all in one trip. We decided that we would take weekend trips to different cities and maybe not do everything there is to do there but get a feel for a place that if we wanted to, we could go back and visit again for longer if we wanted.

So the next layer was a template of goals or guidelines that we wanted to achieve on every trip we went on.

I decided to also track total miles traveled per trip, just for fun. 🙂

So the binder dividers were labeled like this:

• Calendar
• Places We’ve Been
• Places We Want To Go
• Travel Details and Budget
• Goals and Notes

Calendar:

This is pretty self explanatory. I printed out a blank calendar and filled in our extra curricular and school schedules and then started filling in weekend trips around what we had. It was nice to see everything all laid out and helped me keep things more organized! You can find the calendar I’ve created here.

Places We’ve been:

This was a section I used to list everywhere we had already been so we can note if there was anything we wanted to check out in these places or revisit at some point.

Places We Want To Go:

Here is the section that I put the adventure plan spreadsheet. I listed the 40 places we wanted to see, a column to determine if they were kid friendly or not, next a potential travel date, and finally a column for the best time to visit. I got a book from my sister for Christmas called Where to go When. It helped in our planning and organizing of literally when to go where!

Travel Details and Budget:

This is the section where I wrote down all my user names and passwords for all the apps I had. (Southwest, Marriott, Airbnb, Verb, Turo, Groupon, MLB, SeatGeek, Uber, Booking.com) It’s alot to keep up with so this was great to keep all my important info in one place.

BUDGETTTTTTTTTT. UGH.

Here is what we did. I know everyone is different and every place is different so this was more of a guideline than a hard definite.

Friday-Sunday Cost Sheet: Total Trip Cost (approximately) $1,050/trip

Goals & Notes:

A section to jot down advice people had given me, as well as keep a list of other goals we had. For example, see a Green Bay Packers game and see a Kansas City Chiefs game.

Here I also put any brochures that I requested.– This is a great way to get more information about a city you’re unfamiliar with! I would email the cities’ tourist “more info” email and they would mail or email me a FREE brochure!

I hope this binder will help you achieve your travel goals and make all that dreaming and pinterest scrolling a reality!

Cheers to getting out there and seeing some place new!

<3,

Allie

P.S. Here the link to the travel binder one more time!