A Simple List Helps Begin Planning

After going back and forth with our calendars – and factoring my London trip into the equation – we came up with an initial strategy.

TJ will fly out the day after me to help save her vacation time, since I will be busy in London anyway. She will arrive Saturday and have time to decompress and poke around – then we will have Sunday together. Monday, we will fly to Italy.

The big variable was determining how much time she will spend in Italy. She decided that, even though my return ticket to Savannah is from London on a Monday, that she wanted to return to Savannah the previous Friday.

That gives her two full weeks in Italy – and leaves me with three nights on the tail end of the trip. Currently, I have not decided if I will return to London when she leaves, stay in Florence (her departure city) or wander around Tuscany some more. Regardless, I must be back to London on Sunday night in order to catch my LHR to SAV flight on Monday morning.


It helped to get my head around this by making a simple list of the cities and the number of hotel nights in each, shown here.

From this, I’ll build a spreadsheet with our individual itineraries and our joint itineraries. I’ll have columns for hotel nights, details like where reservations are made for hotel, rental car and the like, and lastly, a budget column that I’ll fill in as we progress with bookings.

When completed prior to the trip, the single page spreadsheet will provide all the details and a day-by-day itinerary.

We will carry printed copies with us, but also stash copies on our tablets, on Google Drive and on Dropbox.

Better safe than sorry!