NOTE: I didn’t write up this trip report until August 2018, a full five years following our trip.  I had to rely on the Spreadsheet ‘o Fun and the memories of all four of us to reconstruct our trip.  Hopefully I didn’t get too much wrong!

This trip has its roots in 1972, when I was 8 years old and my parents took my two sisters and I to Europe for a month.  I can recall almost the entire trip, so when our boys were young I vowed that I’d wait until the youngest was eight before taking a trip to the UK with the family, in hopes that everyone would have solid, life-long memories.  Well, that date arrived in 2013 when Robert was 13 and Andrew was 8, so off we went!

Eileen and I had taken a delayed honeymoon about 8 months after we got married and spent a couple of weeks in 1998 in the UK, starting with a few days in London and then a week in Wales.  We’d had an incredible time.  We wanted the boys to also experience Wales and its abundance of castles, but we didn’t want to necessarily recreate our honeymoon trip.  Fortunately, we had steered clear of a lot the big tourist spots in 1998.  Most notably, we didn’t go to the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey.  Going to some of those spots would be perfect for the boys, however, so all that needed to be done was to put together a plan.

The Spreadsheet ‘o Fun

I LOVE trip planning!  With the advent of Google and (in particular) Google Maps, I’ve spent countless hours looking into places to go, places to stay, places to see, and places to eat.  For this trip I had several months in which to do research, so every free moment was spent online looking around.  In addition to putting together an ever-evolving touring plan, I was also learning “the lay of the land” and learning about tons of options. 

How did I do this?  By building what the rest of the family came to call “The Spreadsheet ‘o Fun”.  I always pull out Microsoft Excel whenever I need to track large amounts of data.  Basically, everything I ever discovered online, whether related to transportation (flights, trains, rental cars, the Underground), attractions, hotels, B&Bs, restaurants, geography – well, all of that went into a tab on the spreadsheet.  If I thought there was ANY chance that the info would come in handy, I wrote it down.  So when looking at London (for example), I had written down info on a dozen or so potential hotels, including pricing, ratings, web site URLs, and so forth.  For attractions I had ticket costs, opening hours, estimated time to tour, and so on.  (In 2018, looking back at my first-ever S-‘o-F created for this 2013 trip, I’m amused at just how primitive it was.  I’ve learned a LOT about trip planning since then and current S-‘o-Fs are so much better organized now.)

Since I had so many months to play around, I kept going back and adding more information.  At one point, mostly on a whim, I ended up grabbing the latitude and longitude of every potential attraction and restaurant on our list because I was a little worried that the GPS we were taking along – we were renting a car – was going to be a challenge.  Well, guess what?  In the US you usually punch in your destination by supplying an address, while in the UK you usually punch in postal codes.  Even though I’d supposedly downloaded postal codes to my GPS, they weren’t working when we got there.  That would have rendered our GPS useless for navigation…except for the fact that I had noted down the lat/long for destinations!  All those months of eye rolling by the family over how Dad had gone nuts were replaced with…well, more eye rolls.  But now everyone agrees: NEVER diss the Spreadsheet ‘o Fun!!

This was actually the first time I’d spent so much time on data gathering for a trip.  I put together a lot of different options for each day of touring, going so far as to scheduling each day’s activities in 15 minute increments, based upon estimated times we’d spend doing any given activity.  It was this level of detailed planning that caused most of the eye rolling, but I did end up confirming that I’m a bit of an idiot savant when it comes to time estimation.  The first day in London ended up matching up to the schedule almost exactly, without me pushing folks to meet any artificial timelines.  It just ended up that my guesses as to how the day would pass turned out to be on the nose.  Over the course of future trips this has served us well, as it has meant that our touring plans end up being incredibly practical and realistic, allowing us the confidence that we’ll end up spending an appropriate amount of time doing what we want to do, and avoiding unrealistic plans.  We’ve never ended up trying to cram too much into too little time.

There are two things I loved about all the pre-planning, and I’ve repeated this process in every subsequent trip we’ve taken over the years.  First: once we got on the ground in the UK – and the finely tuned plan had to be adjusted, as every plan does – I felt tremendous confidence that I had a lot of viable choices.  Having invested so much time up front I didn’t feel worried that I was going to make poor decisions because I was lacking knowledge of our surroundings.  At any given moment I could pull out a Plan B, Plan C, and sometimes even a Plan D.  This is SO much better than standing in the middle of an unknown city feeling like the only thing you can do is settle for going to the place you can literally see in front of you simply because you have no idea what is just a short walk away.

The second thing I love about all the pre-research is that I feel like I’m already on vacation when I’m looking at maps, or reading restaurant menus, or reading through the website of some potential attraction.  So I get two vacations for the price of one!