I don’t know if it’s just me or my family, but vacations, or even day trips can sometimes be unnecessarily stressful. As someone who has been on enough stressful trips for a lifetime, I have come up with some tips to help any vacation planner make the process a little less stressful:
1. Look up the area you are visiting at least a few weeks- a month in advance.
Looking up things to do in advance can help ease the stress of planning overall. My family and I have been planning a trip to a few cities in Texas this winter, and it was my job to find all of the places we would want to see. Now that we know what areas we are going to visit, we were able to book our hotels and think about restaurants we might want to check out. Also, it helps organize what places may need reservations. This avoids any discrepancies that could potentially come up on the trip itself.
2. Book your hotel/Air BNB near the sights you want to see.
Mapping out all of the places you want to see beforehand so that you can find hotels near those places helps so much! For our upcoming trip, I literally tagged all of the places we wanted to see in each of the cities, and then my dad was able to book hotels closer to all of the locations. This is definitely going to save us travel time in each of the cities and will eliminate some of the stress.
3. Make at least one breakfast reservation.
My family is really big on trips to Disney World, we go way more than we should. We have not been the biggest fan of the food in the parks, but on our most recent trip we noticed that the food has definitely gotten better. Disney World has been adding more vegetarian and vegan options lately so that is really great for those with certain food restrictions. For our next trip to Disney World we are definitely going to book some sort of breakfast reservation so that we are forced to get to the park early. The whole point of making the reservation is that it just forces you to start the day early and make the most of your trip.
4. Bring your own water bottles or buy a whole case for the group
We were seeing a bunch of different towns and cities in both states and none of them were close to each other, so we rented a car for a majority of our trip. In some of the more remote locations or on some of the longer car rides, it did not make sense to only use our reusable water bottles. Functionally, it did not work because there obviously was no water bottle refilling stations in the Grand Canyon or on the open highways that went through desert like land. We instead got one large case of water bottles and just used that for the entire trip. We would refill them when we could, of course. Financially, it made no sense to keep buying new bottles, buying one case was much cheaper. We would keep it in the trunk of the car (we went during winter so the water stayed pretty cool even during the day) and just pulled from it whenever we needed it.
5. Bring some form of entertainment.
A good chunk of vacation time is spent traveling and there is hardly anything fun to do when you are stuck in a plane, car, train, etc. I usually download some episodes of a show or a whole movie on Netflix. Sometimes it’s best to just read a good book. A lot of people do not like the actual travel part of the trip, but I secretly love it because it means I can just sit back and relax and finally catch up on whatever book I am reading. During the semester I am usually too busy with school work to a lot any time for books that are not for school. I like to take advantage of the actual travel portion of my trips to catch up on shows, see the most recent movies, and even finish a book.
I know these are only five tips, but they are vital tips for having a stress-free trip that optimizes your time and experience on the actual vacation itself. The whole point of vacation is to take a break from school or work or any other possible stresses in your life. There is no need for you vacation to be stressful as well. With proper planning and some little tips along the way, an ideal vacation is possible.