I have been asked many times how you plan for a yearlong trip. How do you know where you are going to stay at night or where you are going to go next? It struck me how different this trip is from our 1984 trip to Southeast Asia (July 11, 2014 post). During that trip we had no technology. I can hear you saying, “no technology, no way” but we had no cell phone, no computer and no iPad. Our planning, communication with home and how we remembered our trip was very different from this adventure.

In 1984, our research before our trip involved scouring the Lonely Planet Guide for information. We made no reservations. We had only our round trip fare from Los Angeles to Bangkok Thailand. As we got to each new destination we used the travel guide or asked around until we found a place to stay.

While we were gone we had no communication from home for the whole time. I sent postcards to my mom and dad every few days so they would not worry.

We took lots and lots of pictures to remember our trip by. We could not see any of the pictures until the film was developed. We had rolls and rolls of film to be developed when we got home. It was very expensive and many of the pictures weren’t even worth keeping.

In this post I will write about our trip planning and in future posts I will write about communication and photos.

Planning is so different now. Much of our research for the trip has been done online. I still love books and have purchased several on long-term travel and specific locations. I especially enjoyed becoming familiar with travel blogs…. getting to know the writers and following their adventures. I have spent the past few years finding and reading travel blogs (my July 25, 2014 post listed several of my favorites). As I read I became increasingly confident that we could really do this trip. That was what inspired me to start this blog!

We researched and made our airplane plane reservations online. I watched airfares and had websites telling me when it was the optimum time to buy and get the best price for months before we took the plunge and purchased our tickets. We also looked at many language schools, read reviews and made our decision based on online research. I still called them before we made our reservation and paid our deposit because I am old-fashioned I guess.

One of the dangers or challenges of today’s internet age is that there is so much information available the question becomes how do you consume it all, how do you make it work for you without overwhelming you. It has been said that getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. Each and every moment of the waking day, we are deluged with information. Thank goodness for Google Search! I don’t have to remember every interesting fact, I can look it up in a matter of seconds (don’t forget to bookmark it!). For me the challenge is when to stop looking and gathering information and just make the decision.