How to... plan a big trip - choosing your destinations

You catch the travel bug..... your feet are itchy and you want to get planning.... but the world is your oyster so where should you go? 

This is a tricky question, I don't know about you but my "wish list" is huge. So many places I want to see, so many things I want to do. So how do you chose you destinations and start to put together an itinerary for a big trip!?

This is a dilemma we were faced with a couple of years ago now.  I was one year into a doctorate degree and already thinking about how we could celebrate its completion. I would be starting work after this, in a new post, which meant I could be flexible with my start date. This presented a rare opportunity which doesn't happen often in "adult life", the opportunity to go away for more than two weeks! We decided we were going to do this..... "a trip of a life time" this was going to be the gap year I never had...... albeit a gap 8 weeks!!! So where where where!?? 

For us, the answer to this question lay in one single photo! I follow This Amazing World of Ours on Facebook! They are a page which share stunning photos of places, animals and general world beauty! These photos are mine blowing, I would seriously encourage you to check them out! I mean you see photos of places are you're immediately like "ok world, I'm coming to get you". You will never go on a two week resort holiday again after you see some of the amazing sights out there! Well on this particular day a photo came up of "Heavan's Gate" which is in Tianmen Mounrain National Park in Jangjiajie, China! Of course I can't find THE actually photo now..... course I can't!!!!! But it was like this.......  But with brighter colours and more light shining down from heaven! We saw this an went "WE NEED TO GO HERE!"

And that was our starting point, and that is step one....... 

Step 1: Find your starting point

Find something that ignites the passion, that ramps up the excitement! That place that triggers off the plans, that spurs on the momento! Boom, the cogs are turning.

Step 2: If it's a trip of a life time, then make it so

Our step two was all about googling and finding out "must sees". We were searching things like "must see places before you die", "most amazing travel sights", "destinations not to be missed".... you get the picture. We googled and googled and googled! Anytime we saw somewhere amazing, we copied pictures and details to a word document! This helped to build up a list of amazing places, beautiful sights and special destinations!

Step 3: Organise that chaos

So if your anything like us that word document will soon be chaos. A jumble of pictures and text that goodness knows how long! Time to organise it. First of all by county then by city. Cluster things together. You will then start to get a sense of potential destination and where these may be clustered! 

For us it quickly became clear that we were going to Asia! Yeah..... we had narrowed it down from the world to a continent! #achievement 

Step 4: Have I missed anything?

Re-googling with your new narrower criteria (e.g "must see sights in Asia", "top places to go in Asia", "stunning sights in Asia") will help make sure you've not missed anything!

Step 5: Traffic Light it!!!!

Ok so this is when stuff gets fun! We bought a map of Asia and sheets of coloured dot stickers! We then used a "traffic light stystem" to categorise he sights.

Green = Must see - non-negotiable.... we need to go there 

Amber = This would be great to see if possible

Red = if we are in the area we will check it out, but we won't go out our way.

Then categorise each location and put a corresponding colour sticker onto the map at the location of that activity/sight. Once you are done you will have one very spotty map - but this should give you a visual illustration of where those green dot sights are - we found that a route naturally emerged from this, and voila we had our plan!

Do you have any other top tips for destination planning? Would love to hear them, Bx