We recently took a vacation to London, Paris, and Edinburgh – May 27th to June 11th.
Yes, in that strange order.
We don’t go on many vacations, so I wanted to fit in as much as I could, since it is highly unlikely we would ever go back together (though I’ve been to London and Edinburgh before, in high school). I was worried I might get too overwhelmed partway through – being around lots of people and trying to be out and about the majority of the day are literally the opposite of what I would describe as my ideal day. However, I decided to just plan for it and try to power through it… even knowing I had to go straight back to work afterward and wouldn’t have any recharge time at all.
Before I started the planning for each day, we had already made some dinner reservations we needed to make early. This included one Michelin-starred restaurant in each city:
We started off making a Google map of each city and putting in the reservations we already had. I made layers for each day of our trip, and put those locations on the appropriate layers. Then we each added things we wanted to do on a “Planning” layer – with color-coded icons, of course. Using the map, I planned specific days we would do specific things, with location being a very large factor.
Finally these were moved to a Google calendar. I color-coded them:
- Yellow – general notes (like hotel stays, leave this chunk of time free so you can go home and change into fancy clothes, etc.)
- Red – strict times (we have reservations or tickets)
- Blue – flexible times (we have tickets for this day but it doesn’t matter what time)
- Green – completely flexible (planned for this day but we have no tickets and we could move them or just not do them)
- Grey – while we were there I also ended up coloring some stuff grey if we didn’t end up doing them
Unfortunately, it seems like color-coding in a Google calendar can only be seen by you even if you share the calendar, so Jack couldn’t even make use of the colors. I also left the time zone as my local time zone but found that you can add a secondary time zone for reference, so I added London’s time. Unfortunately that also seems to only apply to yourself, so Jack had to add it separately for his view.
And now, one photo from each city
(Coca-Cola) London Eye
Eiffel Tower
Calton Hill
