Wild West Trip, part 3: Using Google tools to plan the trip

First of all, I apologize for posting what basically amounts to an ad for Google services, but I’m hoping that someone else out there who already has a Google Account (get one free) may see this and try it for themselves. If not, hopefully it will at least be interesting to you while you read it. Otherwise, you can contact the complaint department and someone will be happy to assist you.

Google Maps

At some point in the first few days of researching the trip, I realized that there were so many places to visit, that I was going to have a hard time keeping everything straight in my mind without some sort of advanced planning and documentation. The first thing I did when I saw how much there is available to do and see, was to check Google Maps for the driving times between each destination and our base location in Flagstaff. This is when I realized that I needed to save the locations into a Google “My Maps” saved map, so that I wouldn’t have to continually what else we wanted to see and where these places were located. My Maps lets you save locations as push pins, and highlight areas, paths, and roads by actually drawing right onto the Google map that you are working with. You can add video, photos and website links to the maps, and annotate them however you like. I now have a map that I can check each day while we’re on vacation to get information about each location I’ve saved and the website links to go with those. I can easily plan my route for the next morning’s excursions by routing from one location to the next. Here is my actual map, for you to look through. You can click on any of the points of interest that I’ve marked to get an idea of what each one is about.

Gmail

I also used Gmail’s labels feature to label all plane, hotel, resort, rental car email reservations as “Grand Canyon Trip” emails and archived them so that months down the road (now just less than a week away), I would be able to click the label and see all of my related email and information, and print it all out to take with me on the trip. I have been emailing information websites that I found about points of interest to myself over the past few months and have all of that gathered info at my fingertips. I can even link to these emails straight from my Google Map.

Google Calendar

I also set up a calendar in Google’s Calendar program and share it with my wife’s Google account, so that she could access it and update or change it if needed. We are now actually using it as a family calendar instead of having a written one hanging on the wall, but I originally started it just for planning this trip. I have all of our days planned out, morning and evening. We have so much to see and do, that it was imperative to have it planned out well ahead of time so that we could fit it all in without feeling rushed and tired out. We may not make it out to that area again, so we wanted to make it count!

Google Spreadsheets

One last Google Product that we used is Google Spreadsheets (part of their free online office suite). We created a spreadsheet to help us track everything that we thought of that we needed to pack, like cameras, clothing items, toiletries, etc. It’s a shared document that both Ebeth and I can edit and get updated when the other person edits. Over the past couple of months, we’ve just added whenever we thought of something that we might want to have with us.

Have Fun!

The final tip I will give you is to have fun once the time for your vacation actually arrives! It’s going to be tough to do that if you haven’t planned well. You don’t have to use Google products, but planning months in advance of a big trip is a must.