Planning

Alaska 2016/Planning: The "Other" Vacation

For me, planning for vacation is almost as much fun as vacation itself - and it lasts considerably longer, too! I began planning for this trip back in 2014. Starting that early allowed for considerable opportunity to go really deep into advance research. The various tabs of this blog devoted to each location we were to visit contain details specific to each location. Here I'll instead describe my basic approach.

The Spreadsheet 'o Fun

There are two constants in my life: Google and Microsoft Excel. When I need information, I use my black belt skills in Google-fu. And when I need to keep a record of data, I pull out Excel. In addition to my regular use of Excel for actual business purposes, it still remains the best ad-hoc database around, in my opinion. So when vacation rolls around, I call upon my favorites and get to work.

Several years ago we took a trip to the UK that saw my first serious use of a spreadsheet for tracking data. I spent months looking up places we might want to go, places we might want to stay, restaurants we might want to eat at, and so forth. EVERYTHING I learned went into "The Spreadsheet". When, many months into the research cycle, I spent one day looking up various destinations on Google Maps and recording the longitude and latitude of the locations (in addition to the addresses I already had collected) my family rolled their eyes. But guess what? Once we got to the UK it turned out that our GPS, which we brought to help us navigate, was unable to find any of the UK postal codes we had supposedly programmed it with - and entry of postal codes is the normal way to find something on a GPS in the UK. No matter - I had the longitude and latitude values so we simply used those instead. "Never disrespect the Spreadsheet 'o Fun!" is now the family slogan. (Rolling eyes at how much time dad spends working on the spreadsheet is still fair game, however.)

A few years ago someone on CruiseCritic posted a spreadsheet template that was keyed to Royal Carribean's Oasis of the Seas. I regret that I can't find the original post, because I'm deeply indebted to that poster for sharing her work. I have continued to modify her template to more closely suit my needs and have posted it here for those who want to use it. I've removed identifying information and pricing details, but this is otherwise the final product. Note that a lot of these tabs were stubs, as I played around with different ideas. For example, there's a skeleton for the Radiance Northbound route which I quickly decided didn't offer enough time at the various ports, so I abandoned further development and hid (but did NOT delete!) the tab.

The most important advice I can offer is:
1) Write down EVERYTHING.
2) Delete NOTHING.

I cannot begin to count the number of times I've gone back to items that weren't part of my then-current plans and incorporated them into back into things. I've written down many items, sometimes thinking "why am I bothering to write this down? I'm not going to do this?!" only to revisit it weeks or months later and decide that maybe it really is something that we'll do. I'm still selective about what I write down - the item has to appeal to me enough to make me want to take a note of it in the first place.

Northbound or Southbound?

The first major decision for us was: which direction? From the start, we were leaning Southbound. This is because we expected we'd want to tour some of Alaska on land - and we know from prior experience that land touring is more tiring than cruising. By starting in Alaska pre-cruise we could tire ourselves out and look forward to relaxing on the ship at the end. Had we gone Northbound and THEN tried to do some land touring we expected that this would be more tiring.

Denali or Not?

This was the second major decision. In order to see Denali National Park we'd have to add at least 4 days to our trip: A night in Fairbanks, two days for Denali (including 1/2 day of train travel), and then one more day of travel to Anchorage. Basically, getting 1.5 days to play around in Denali required 4 days of commitment. We went back and forth on the value of this...but, in the end, we finally decided that we might never get another chance to return to Alaska and it was "now or never". So Denali was "in".

So our trip divided into two sections: a pre-cruise land tour of our own devising involving eight of us (D, E, R, A, S, W, M, C) and then a meet up with N, H, and J in Anchorage on our way to Seward and, eventually, the cruise itself.