Road Trip Budget

One of my financial goals for 2018 is to save for our planned California road trip in the fall.  When I posted the goal, I set myself a deadline of March to have a detailed estimate budget sorted out.  And, since March starts this week, I figured I should get this sorted out.

So… What’s the plan?  Well, we don’t really have a plan yet… But, the last time we did a road trip down to California, it was a bit of a rush because we tried to get it done in 7 days… there and back!  For this trip, we will be traveling with a 6 month old baby, and will traveling further in to California, and staying there for a few days for the wedding… So I decided to plan for a 14 day trip this time.

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Hello Again!

I’m not exactly sure how I got here… But I seem to be deep in to my third month of life chaos and craziness, and I’m just barely keeping up with my regular life necessities, so the blog has had to take a backseat.

Unfortunately, with all this chaos, a bunch of things have joined the blog in the backseat… Like my health and fitness goals, my plan to have monthly challenges and report on them, and keeping track of anything at all relating to my goals for 2017… I’d like to change that, so I’m going to try and focus on that in the next little while here, and will hopefully get my sh*t together enough to actually post about it too!

In the meantime, I thought I’d share a little about my new found pastime!  (I know it seems counter intuitive that I would start something new when I can’t keep up with my current commitments, but whatever… Don’t judge…)

Hawaiian Trip Journal in my BuJo

Well, I’m back from my vacation, and it really was a holiday.  I didn’t bring a laptop, and I didn’t check email, or keep up on my blog, so it has definitely been a bit of catch-up now that I am back… The number of emails in my collection of inboxes was quite high!  I’m still working on getting back to the normal routine, so I don’t have any real content to share with you today…

Instead, I thought I’d share a couple images of my bullet journal that I used as a travel journal for my trip.  I’m pretty proud of my doodles, so I’m going to share… I “should” be back to normal by Thursday and will hopefully have something more exciting for you.  Until then, “Aloha!”

Travel Prep in my Bullet Journal

I never seem to get ahead of the game… every time I think I’m finally getting a handle on being organized, something comes up, or I say yes to one too many things…

Anyway, the latest thing that snuck up on me (other than missing a Tuesday blog post, shhhh) was our spring break vacation. I am currently typing this on my phone while I wait for our flight to Hawaii. (I know, I know, it’s not good to tell the interweb where we are going and when, but we have housesitters in our house, so it’s not abandoned, and that’s all the details you are getting… )

In order to help me get organized, I made a couple spreads in my bullet journal.  The first was just the trip details for planning purposes. 

This is where I put down the pertinent information about our flights, accommodation and car rental. It made it easy to check on and share with those that needed to have that info. 

The second spread that really helped me get sorted and not stress out was my packing list. 

I’m sure that I ended up over packing for this trip, but at least with the list I knew I wasn’t going to forget anything important. Or, at least I haven’t discovered that I’ve forgotten anything yet… 

Anyway, I probably won’t do another post while I’m on holidays, but will rest up and get lots of good ideas for when I return. Enjoy your spring break!

Minimalist Honeymoon Packing

Recently, Anne Lene over at Minimalist Sometimes did a post about her one bag only packing for a 3 week trip to Houston.  It got me thinking about doing a similar post about our 3 week honeymoon.

For our honeymoon, my husband and I wanted to use trains and public transit (with quite a bit of walking in between) for most of our travel, so we decided to try to pack as minimalist as possible.  We each brought only a carry-on roll-y suitcase and a small backpack.

Packing for 3 weeks of travel in a small suitcase was a little tough, mostly because of the time of year we were traveling.  March and April are transition months for weather in the north-western area of Europe where we were traveling.  Some mornings at the beginning of the trip we would get up and there would be remnants of frost on the ground… And by the end of our trip, my husband was in shorts and a t-shirt and was plenty warm.  (As you’ll see a bit later, I didn’t bring shorts, so this wasn’t an option for me…)

When I was packing, I also wanted to make sure that I packed for all the possible activities that we might be doing.  We didn’t go to Europe with a set itinerary planned out, so we had no idea what we might end up doing.  As such, I ended up with a lot of things that I packed “just in case we spend a day or two doing this…” or “we might go to something fancy and need to dress up…”  And I didn’t want to look totally out of place in fashionable Paris… not that I ever claim to be fashionable, but thought it best to try and look a little nicer than if I was backpacking through the woods in rural BC.

Oh, and the last thing I wanted to avoid was having to do laundry all the time.  It was vacation time, and so I wanted enough clothing that I could get away with only one or two required laundry stops.  We ended up only doing one major laundry wash (while staying with family in Belgium) and then did a couple “hand wash in the sink and hang in the bathroom overnight to dry” type cleanings for a few key items.

So, with all that in mind, how did I do?  Did I pack too much?  Did I use everything I took?  Would I do something different “next time”?  (I don’t anticipate another honeymoon, but you get the idea…)  Let’s go over everything in detail…