Organising trips (1 Viewer)

[pppppvvvv]

How do people plan their trips?

I've tried various note taking /project planning/ trip planning apps but seem to be arriving back at a spreadsheet (or a sheet of paper!) everytime.

In particular keeping track of the itinerary, notes for each location, accomodation each night, travel times between places.

Can't believe that a spreadsheet is the best solution in this day and age?! But maybe it is, if the criteria is free and visible across devices.

 

[njlarsen]

I usually use the app tripcase for itinerary, but there is limited space for notes. additionally, it (for a long time now) is not available when offline, so not very valuable when birding in a country where you either don't have coverage at all due to excessive roaming charges, or where you don't have coverage outside of cities due to insufficient number of towers.

So I also supplement with a spreadsheet.
Niels

 

[pppppvvvv]

I usually use the app tripcase for itinerary, but there is limited space for notes. additionally, it (for a long time now) is not available when offline, so not very valuable when birding in a country where you either don't have coverage at all due to excessive roaming charges, or where you don't have coverage outside of cities due to insufficient number of towers.

So I also supplement with a spreadsheet.
Niels

I don't think I tried Tripcase, but it sounds like a non-starter. I dabbled with tripit, and Wanderlog which I suspect are very similar!
If I can get my spreadsheet to look a bit more visual, (and I'm sure project mgrs in work have used a spreadsheet for gantt charts), then I'll probably be quite happy.

Obsidian has potential, but you need Rocket scientist levels of intellect to get it working. I haven't used it for a few days, and now am wondering what on earth is going on with some of the things I created previously!

 

[Mike Crawley]

Not birding trips but when my partner and I went to New Zealand for a month in 2019 I put everything in a spreadsheet, just as I had in 2015 for my first visit to New Zealand.
As you say, surely it isn’t the best solution available - except that it pretty much is the best. My 2019 trip included a few days in Singapore en route and a long weekend in Dubai.
Everything was clearly shown over various pages and available on my iMac, iPad and iPhone and stored in “the Cloud”.
Plus the option to have a hard copy in our luggage “just in case”

 

[Andrew Whitehouse]

I tend to do a spreadsheet too, where I list target birds and the places to look for them. I then have the itinerary in a Word document. That's about it - simple but it works and is easy to put together.

 

[pppppvvvv]

I've got used to a few trips in my campervan, where it is so flexible, it's ridiculous.
I don't have to book anywhere, can be ahead or behind schedule, can literally do the trip in reverse to take account of less than ideal weather etc

I'm trying to keep some of that philosophy on a fly drive / air BnB type trip, so making it a bit more flexible. But that's not how my mind works. My instinct is to know what I'm doing at any hour of the trip!
At least if the options are clear in front of me, then I'll hopefully go at the right pace.
It's project management isn't it!!

 

[jurek]

I use spreadsheet and text docs. Basically flexible and not dependent on any fancy platform , little new to kearn and little can go wrong if you avoid fancy options.

Good point Peter that increasingly I find that major thing about being on a holiday is not having to plan ahead, having a free mind. But this is a different topic altogether.

 

[pppppvvvv]

I've been dabbling in note taking apps for a while now. Not to the extent of some who appear to be fine tuning their note taking to the point they aren't actually doing any work!

Anyway, I've settled on one app, Logseq, that looks really useful for birding trips with a list of target species.
It uses markdown, so this may be compatible with other apps such as obsidian. Logseq however was simple enough to enable me to learn and develop this all myself.

The "manual" step was compiling the species list as a list of Todo tasks, and adding links to locations for each task. (could link to habitat types, or months maybe useful for moths and butterflies)
Once that was in place, the location pages are automatically populated, and I added a query in each location page to list the species.

Finally, you embed the pages in the daily journal for the day you are visiting the site. The journal then has the target species list for each site you visit; plus anything else you add like field notes, you can pull in photos, pdfs, make voice notes, etc

As you tick off any species from the target list in the journal, it will be taken off all the location pages it was on, plus the master list.


(Dummy data!)

Let me know if you'd like the "templates".
I don't find these note apps/markdown the easiest thing in the world, but this looks to have potential.

 

[Butty]

Cripes.
I just look at birds...

 

[pppppvvvv]

Cripes.
I just look at birds...

It's a bit of exercise for my brain!
I've always had to look after the nerdy side of me to some extent

 

[pppppvvvv]

Logseq is very good. just enough "power users" around to give you inspiration.
In this case, uploading calls from xeno canto, both as an offline library, and tagging them as flashcards to learn, on the outbound flight