The Best Way We Found to Organize Our Navigation While on Vacation

The rapid growth in tech solutions has made organizing life much easier. Many conversations with friends and family end up with someone, at some point, exclaiming that they have an app for whatever you are discussing. Imagine what happens when we are far from home and lose access to our apps and technology. Quickly a great day becomes a very stressful day. To fix potential stress, we have a reference to back up our tech and provide addresses and numbers on the fly.

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I am currently working with my wife to organize our excursions for an upcoming trip to Europe. We usually build most of our travels around a beautiful beach or pool to relax while the kids play. But our kids are quickly becoming teens, and we want our teens to experience parts and pieces of the world beyond the beaches.

When we plan for the beach, we may include one or two excursions that pick us up at the hotel and bring us back after several hours of fun and adventure. Our days in Europe will be filled exclusively with sightseeing and museum or attraction hopping. Each day will take us to another part of a city or town to learn and experience the local culture. Traveling through the city and countryside requires careful planning and organizing. There are many useful apps to help build itineraries or map travel routes and interface with public and private transportation. But what happens when we lose access to our tech?

We like to use a navigation sheet. Our navigation sheet can be multiple pages of paper if needed. However, we still refer to the packet as our navigation sheet. We build the sheet by recording the address of our hotel at the top of the page. This gives us a quick reference for using google maps and other similar apps. We then list excursions, activities, and their addresses. Using google maps, we can get an approximate time from point A to point B and an approximate cost to travel to the next activity. Once we have the approximations, we record them next to the excursion.

When using google maps to build your sheet, it is essential to log into the map app on the day and the time that corresponds with the day of the week and time that you want to travel using the metro or ride service on vacation. For instance, let's say we are traveling to visit the Louvre on a Wednesday while on vacation. One or two weeks before our holiday, I will log onto google maps when we want to leave the hotel and record the travel time by car and the price for a ride share or the travel time by metro and the suggested lines. Often certain lines run differently on different days and traffic routes are longer and shorter based on the time of day.

Remember that to include the use of buses, metros, and trains, in your journey, you must purchase upon-arrival passes through the local transit authority.

Example of a navigation log between our hotel and the Louvre and then from the Louvre to the Love Lock Bridge:

Wed.

Hotel to Louvre - Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris

12 min. Drive 18 min Bike Ride Service 12 Euros

Louvre to Love Lock Bridge - Pont de l'Archevêché, 75004 Paris

2 min Drive 3 min Walk

As part of our packet or Navigation sheet, we print off a metro or transit map showing the lines, stations, or stops. If our excursion requires a metro bus or train ride, we add the on and off points to our navigation sheet. If a car or taxi is needed to finish the trip, we add that in.

Example:

Fri.

1)Hotel to Paris Disney - Bd de Parc, 77700 Coupvray

1 hr 31 min Drive

Ride Service 100 euros

40 min Metro and RER ride

M) Pont de Neuily to Charles de Gaulle

RER) Charles de Gaulle to Marne-la-Vallee Chessy

Car Chessy to Disney

The third part of our navigation sheet is printing any driving maps we may need for trips out of town away from the base of our operations. Of course, we will use google maps to drive from A to B, but again, if something happens, we want to have that old trusted map printout with the turn-by-turn directions.

We like to organize our gathered information in a folder in our day pack. This is a backpack or bag we do not set down and is always on one of the members of our group. Security and privacy are important when traveling away from home. You do not want anyone to learn your planned movements and exploit them.

We love all of the modern conveniences of having tech at our fingertips. Still, when we are so far away from home, we like to create redundancy that is easy to follow or understand. Nothing is worse than being lost in an unfamiliar city and needing to research directions online or find someone who can clearly communicate the necessary steps to find our way again.

If you are interested in building a navigation sheet you can find our Navigation Packet supplies here on Amazon

If you like our navigation sheet or have a way you store and organize travel information that you would like to share, send us a message on social media or via our website sunhatsntravelmaps.com