Making a Summer Staycation More of a Vacation 5.2.12

We are all pinching pennies this year, what with the cost of gas and airfare making you want to cry every time you search for flights to somewhere you don't live. If you find your vacation budget is there, but just not enough to stay anywhere for very long or make it worth your while, then a staycation may be in your cards. Don't take a typical one, though. Anyone can stay home and drive around all day and then come back and sleep in their own bed. Why not make it a real adventure and be creative with your planning?

Just because you aren't flying anywhere, doesn't mean you can't stay in a hotel or pack a suitcase. Staycations are boring, because you spend half your time in your own house (and the word is also annoying to hear and say). Chances are you haven't explored your whole city or even nearby cities. Pretend you have never visited where you live before and get excited about tourist attractions. You probably haven't been to them in 10 years, or ever, so they are new to you!

Stay in a town other than where you live. Not up to hanging around your own town? Go a town or two over and explore that one! Stay in a budget hotel or a B&B and make an itinerary with all the touristy stuff there is to do there on it. Just that change of scenery can really help you relax. And even though you could drive there and do a day trip, why not make it a real vacation by putting some money on an affordable accommodation. Claim you're from out of town, (because hey! You are!) and ask "locals" where the best places to eat and visit are. Even if you've already been there, you might learn about some really awesome cafes, shops or parks that you never knew existed.

Get a hotel or vacation rental in the middle of the action. Come on! You haven't see everything in the city you live in, have you? There are still some things in Portland that I have yet to get to...and in Oregon. And I just found out that a couple hours away from here I can see a replica of Stonehenge! (Filing that away for future day-tripping, for sure.) If you live near a big city, chances are there is a fabulous downtown that is full of fun and weird stuff to do. I also bet dollars to doughnuts (yum!) that you don't live downtown, because it is wicked expensive. This is the time to cash in some miles or hotel points for free nights or look into gettng an apartment or condo rental in the middle of it all and set out each day to discover something new and awesome about where you live.

Look online for popular (and obscure) tourist attractions. You already do this when you go on regular vacations. Do it the same way for your hometown and find crazy things you have never heard of before, do things you always say you will or just go be a cheesy tourist and do things that you tell other people are musts when they visit.

Eat at all those food carts you always say you will try, but then never do. Oh the joy of looking at the Twitter feed and seeing a new food cart has opened. You vow you will try it, and then 30 new carts have come and gone and you have yet to drive the 2 miles into town and find parking and eat maybe some of the most delicious stuff you will ever call food. Okay, maybe it will be mediocre or downright disgusting, but you'll never know unless you try it. All in one day you could try salted cod, deep fried cheeseburgers, ham and cheese crepes and Korean short ribs on a stick! (Of course, you'll have to adjust for what your town actually has.) Seriously though. Your city probably has a ton of really cool stuff. If not food carts, like Portland is famous for, then maybe you can hit up a bunch of greasy spoons or taco trucks. At least you'll get exercise walking to each one.

Bring your camera and take lots of pictures. Don't take your city for granted. Just because you see that stuff every day, doesn't mean it's not cool. You'll be sad one day when you talk to someone about things and then realize you have no photos of it or you being there.

We'll talk about more ways to take a unique staycation in Saturday's post. For now, you can start planning your "trip" with the first part of the list. Tomorrow is the start of REVIEWapalooza! All kinds of cool stuff (and giveaways) will be happening this month. Perfect for planning your travel wardrobe and other needs.

Where did you spend your last staycation and what did you do?

Backing Up and Organizing Your Travels Part 2 4.28.12

So, last time we talked about how it’s not so great to just leave everything to chance and only have one copy of your itinerary with you and just assume everything will go to plan. We all learned from Dr. Evil that things never go as you expect. What if you lose the one important piece of paper in your giant stack that you feel the need to bring on vacation with you? What if that one paper has your hotel name, number and address on it and you can’t remember any of those things? What will you do then? Probably go dig through your email until you find it and scribble it all on the back of another one of your many confirmation pages. Wouldn’t it be easier to whittle it all down to day-by-day needs and do away with piles of papers that could still be in your printer? Of course it would! It would also be nice to know that all your photos are safe and sound.

Dropbox – I can’t even tell you how much I love Dropbox. You start with 2GB of space for free, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but you can save so much stuff in there. I use it for my blog photos, all my budget travel book info (media contacts, revisions, cover images, marketing ideas and everything else associated with it) and all my personal things I don’t want to lose, like my resume and important documents. And I still haven’t used up all my space. Essentially, all your files are on an online drive, but you can add the dropbox folder to all your computers, your iPad, your phone and whatever else you might have to store info and have access to it anywhere you are and on whatever device you’re using. If you are just out wandering around and need a file, you can log on online and still be able to get to it in a matter of seconds! You’ll love it, sign up.

Why it’s good for travel is that you can make copies of your passport, visa, credit cards and add a document in there with all the important info you need, like hotel addresses and phone numbers, contacts you might need to get in touch with and anything else you deem important. This way, if something unsavory happens to your belongings, you aren’t completely lost. You can find everything you need wherever you are. And it’s more secure than keeping it in an email folder.

Evernote – I am a devoted Evernote user. I love it. Not only can you use it across all systems like Dropbox, but you can also edit and post to your blog from within it, copy links, pictures or full webpages with a click of a button and even share things to your social networks. I use it on my phone most often, though I’ve taken to writing blog posts with it, too. I have a long-running grocery list (paperless!) in a note, as well as party menus in another and add things that I find that I want to do on my vacations to another. If you see something that looks cool, but can’t really explain it, clip the whole page for later instead of writing down some code and months from now you don’t have to figure out what a Scottish Historic Monument Pub is.

You can have an endless supply of notes and access them anywhere. You can also speak your text into your phone for translation to type, but so far that has only be a source of amusement for me, because if you don’t speak super slowly, you get some really random things that do not make a good blog post. It’s pretty hilarious though!

Anyway, Evernote is great for everything and is a spectacular app for your phone, because you can jot things down if you think of something while you’re sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, waiting for a movie to start, getting your oil changed. Pretty much whenever it’s convenient to send a text, you can be making a list or blogging. So much better than the notepad, too.

Hopefully, you will get a lot of use out of these sites, as well as the two in my previous post. It’s never a bad idea to back up all your important info and things you like to have access to all the time. Emergencies happen, but you can be more prepared to deal with them now. 

Do you use Evernote or Dropbox? Are they favorites? 

Backing Up and Organizing Your Travels Part 1 4.25.12

Ever had a horrible hotel experience? Check out mine at Interiors & Sources magazine. I realize now that this is the experience that has made me so obsessive about travel planning.

When you’re planning for vacation, do you end up with endless pieces of paper for hotels, car rentals and other stuff you’re doing? I know I do, but instead of printing out every last thing that I may or may not need, I now have learned that putting it all together online is a better method and helps me to know exactly where everything is and what I’m still needing. Once I go on my trip, I can print out the necessary things (3 pages vs 42 is easier to carry) and have a back-up for myself that isn’t attached to just my email. I also like to back-up and organize on-the-go, because if my camera gets stolen or I lose it, I will cry my eyes out over all the photos I’ve lost. This is why uploading at the end of each day to “the cloud” or online program is fancy, convenient and helps eliminate the needless worry of impending photo lossage. Yeah, I just made that word up!

Don’t let tragedy make you sadder than it has to. Use a back-up – or several – to keep everything within your reach, even when you lose papers, cameras, your laptop, phone or all your worldly (travel) possessions are stolen.

TripIt.com – Don’t you hate carrying around a novel worth of confirmations and check-in sheets with you while you’re in transit? Sometimes, it takes up so much room, you could have fit in an extra outfit. I have a secret, which is not SO secret anymore, but if you don’t know about TripIt, then you will jump up and down for joy. Okay, maybe just on the inside. Not only can you add an infinite number of things to your itinerary online, but you have space to write in confirmation numbers, phone numbers, addresses, times, who you talked to and how much it all cost you (helping you keep track of your budget…effortlessly!).

Are you dreading now having to input all that stuff more than carrying the stack of papers around? This is the coolest part: You can email your confirmations to TripIt, via their special email address and they will suck all the useful info out for you and instantly updates your itinerary. It says it can take a few hours, but when I’ve done it, it has been a matter of minutes. It’s magic, I tell you! Now, it doesn’t work with all confirmation emails, but many of them. I haven’t tried dining reservations, but I’ll be doing it for sure on my next trip.

Once you have your whole trip planned and input into TripIt goodness, you can share it with everyone you like (although, you can do that anytime) and even post the less detailed version on Facebook, so everyone you know can be jealous…and start plotting the raid of your house. Print out your complete trip plan before you go and whittle down your paperwork from War and Peace to a funner version of Pat the Bunny. And if you want to go totally paperless, get the app and view it all on your smartphone.

Shutterfly – If you take a ton of pictures like I do, it would be a serious tragedy if you lost all of them while on vacation. You would not see a meltdown so big unless I was shot in the leg or found out I had some sort of incurable disease. This is why I do multiple photo uploads on my travels. It may not be every day, but it depends on how many I took that day. The more often you upload, the less time it will take. I travel with a netbook, so when I get back to my hotel/apartment/timeshare/ship cabin in the evening, I pull the SD card out of my camera and dump all my photos. Once I have internet, I select and copy all of them to my Shutterfly folder. This way, if something happens to my netbook or my camera or my SD card all is not lost. Shutterfly has taken over what was once Photoworks, but the merge has made them much easier to use and uploading and editing is so much simpler. (If you currently use Kodak Gallery, Snapfish or York Photos, they will work just as well to keep your photos safe.)

We’ll talk about the rest of my favorite back-up organizational sites for planning and traveling in the next post. It will give you enough time to check out the first two and give them a shot. If you’re planning a vacation right now, even better!

If you currently use TripIt or Shutterfly, what do you think of them?