I am starting to write this blog after a long gap since I returned from the trip. By which, I condemned the basic rule of not procrastinating your blog when your mind is right there at what you want to write. But still I find that I am fresh to pour out my experience. Individually, all the listed things (read further below) provided a sense of comfort, oneness and energy to all of us who traveled together. My emphasis is mostly on smaller but interesting things that people neglect or forget and end up compromising a unique feature during the journey. As far as I consider, the art of travel, itself is an education with pleasure at the brim of the bottle. All that a traveler need to do is to open yourself to it.
Plan your travel
Show commitment starting from scratch to give ideas.
1) How Can you do that?
Browse, e - mail everyone whom you know might be of some help to give you directions/advice or share their experience. The last time we did our planning, we did it two weeks prior to the submission of dissertation. I am stressing on the fact that what ever commitments you might have in a fortnight, you have to push yourself to sit and plan. Honestly, it is not about one person showing the interest. The best way I bring all of my co-travelers together to plan is by talking about the extra cost/time that they would have to invest, if they delay the plan any further. You got to look at the reaction after you complete the discussion. They will eventually buckle-up with laptops in our dorm rooms in the hostel.
2) What can you do to kick-start the plan?
The start-up activity is to draw a silhouette for the plan. This would mean a hand-drawn sketch indicating the intended places of visit with distances, time and mode of transport between all cities or towns. I had attached a similar silhouette for one of the trips we did.
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| Travel Silhouette |
This basic sketch acts also as a precursor to highlight your approximate costs for the trip. With this sketch in hand, you could start to attract more attention from your co-packers. With the data from the above sketch and with an excel sheet, it is easy to compute the cost per person, number of days and most importantly the total expenditure for the trip. To understand how it works, I am attaching a snap-shot of picture as below.
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| Excel Sheet - Plan your Costs, Time & Journey |
The above sheet is self-explanatory and often can be modified every now and then to suit the individual needs. The benefit of preparing this sheet is to start booking the rail/road/air tickets and hotel rooms. Until this stage we work together to get a bird's eye view on the trip. The next stage is crucial to ensure the fact that the places we visit are of significant interest to the majority in the group. We call it the Travel Research and Review.
Work with the plan
Share information that is relevant to the places that are planned in the basic plan.
The last time we did this activity, we divided the cities amongst all of us and each one of us started to collect information on that city/place/town. Some of the sources were from the internet, local tourist information center of that city and city maps from stationers. This helped a lot in filtering out the cities that weren't aligning with our expectations and anticipation for having fun. Later, all the individual research conducted is concocted into a single document / folder and the hard copies of the document were circulated to each of us while we started the journey. During the idle time in train or a noisy bus segment, we would skim through this document to look out for other places that might be of our interests. I am sharing a snapshot of a travel research brochure that we prepared for a recent trip. The quality of our travel research is such that we gave our undeterred attention and energy to find out every fascinating detail about the city or town or a mountain range that we allot for ourselves. Just to cite, one of my friends went on to find out a concert planned (in one of the cities that we wanted to visit) by U2, a rock band associated with Irish republican movement. We considered and fragmented every aspect of that particular place that we wanted to visit with a clear objective to maximize fun and become as exuberant as possible to be able to live in that moment. Once we are done with the TR (Travel Research), we schedule a meeting at a room to proceed to the next stage, which is financing your plan.
Financing your plan
If you are traveling with your close friends or relatives, it is easier to ask some one to cash out money for bookings. Later, accounts can be tallied. This helps in easier transaction and exchange of money. The only thing is to record the expenses in an expense tracker or any such means as shown in the picture in the previous sections. We generally ask one amongst us to do the bookings online and generally the one that pays first for the trip, end up preparing a Preliminary Expense Sheet, which accounts for the costs that are incurred before we actually start on the road. This includes rail/road/air and accommodation expenses for the whole lot of us. Often he is ridiculed as a funding authority who has had control over our wallets. At the end of this stage, we would be ready waiting for that day to start exploring new frontiers. Also ,we all would have got the hard copies of documents/brochures which we hope, would guide us when we start to move the bags.
Summarizing the finances
After we are back from a trip, we would meet up at a common place to discuss the cash transfers. Generally, this takes an hour to tally, which is quiet less owing to the use of excel which speeds up the tallying process. A sample final statement is attached as below,
Outcome
This blog is intended to be useful to people who are new to the world of planning an adventurous trip or travel. Also the views expressed are unique to the creators of these plans. It might sound boring and tiring to do the aforementioned activities in this fashion. But the results are rewarding and there were at least a good bunch of 30 + people who had copied these formats in an USB or laptops to use the tools for their pleasure. I am attaching a few templates that you would find useful when you plan similar trips in future.
Work with the plan
Share information that is relevant to the places that are planned in the basic plan.
The last time we did this activity, we divided the cities amongst all of us and each one of us started to collect information on that city/place/town. Some of the sources were from the internet, local tourist information center of that city and city maps from stationers. This helped a lot in filtering out the cities that weren't aligning with our expectations and anticipation for having fun. Later, all the individual research conducted is concocted into a single document / folder and the hard copies of the document were circulated to each of us while we started the journey. During the idle time in train or a noisy bus segment, we would skim through this document to look out for other places that might be of our interests. I am sharing a snapshot of a travel research brochure that we prepared for a recent trip. The quality of our travel research is such that we gave our undeterred attention and energy to find out every fascinating detail about the city or town or a mountain range that we allot for ourselves. Just to cite, one of my friends went on to find out a concert planned (in one of the cities that we wanted to visit) by U2, a rock band associated with Irish republican movement. We considered and fragmented every aspect of that particular place that we wanted to visit with a clear objective to maximize fun and become as exuberant as possible to be able to live in that moment. Once we are done with the TR (Travel Research), we schedule a meeting at a room to proceed to the next stage, which is financing your plan.
Financing your plan
If you are traveling with your close friends or relatives, it is easier to ask some one to cash out money for bookings. Later, accounts can be tallied. This helps in easier transaction and exchange of money. The only thing is to record the expenses in an expense tracker or any such means as shown in the picture in the previous sections. We generally ask one amongst us to do the bookings online and generally the one that pays first for the trip, end up preparing a Preliminary Expense Sheet, which accounts for the costs that are incurred before we actually start on the road. This includes rail/road/air and accommodation expenses for the whole lot of us. Often he is ridiculed as a funding authority who has had control over our wallets. At the end of this stage, we would be ready waiting for that day to start exploring new frontiers. Also ,we all would have got the hard copies of documents/brochures which we hope, would guide us when we start to move the bags.
Summarizing the finances
After we are back from a trip, we would meet up at a common place to discuss the cash transfers. Generally, this takes an hour to tally, which is quiet less owing to the use of excel which speeds up the tallying process. A sample final statement is attached as below,
 |
| Summarizing the finances |
Outcome
This blog is intended to be useful to people who are new to the world of planning an adventurous trip or travel. Also the views expressed are unique to the creators of these plans. It might sound boring and tiring to do the aforementioned activities in this fashion. But the results are rewarding and there were at least a good bunch of 30 + people who had copied these formats in an USB or laptops to use the tools for their pleasure. I am attaching a few templates that you would find useful when you plan similar trips in future.
