Planning - how much is too much?

When I went to New Zealand last year with my sister and my best friend, we planned almost everything to the last detail. Hostels all booked before we got there, most activities, all the transport... We even had a spreadsheet to keep track of who had paid what and how much the whole thing was going to cost.

Planning? What planning?

But when I travelled for 3 weeks around Australia with my friend Paul, we didn't go into nearly as much detail. Sure we booked most of the activities ahead, but only by a week or two and while we booked some of the hostels by the time we'd done Tasmania (where we'd stayed at my student house) and Alice Springs, we were only booking a few days ahead. Indeed, when we flew into Adelaide from Alice, we'd only booked one night in the hostel, figuring we didn't know how much there was to do in Adelaide and Paul already had some more student accommodation lined up in Melbourne. I'm not really fond of not knowing where I'm going to sleep so I wasn't best pleased when we decided to stay another night in Adelaide only to find that our current hostel was booked up. OK, so we managed to get into a YHA, but I'd rather not experience that again.

Madness sets in in Adelaide. (Sorry, Paul)

The upcoming Ireland trip has also been planned to death - most of the hostels are booked, car hire is in progress (more on that in a future post) and we've started looking at what we want to do while we're there. Once more, there is a spreadsheet, budgeting for every little thing.

So the question is, how much planning is too much?

I actually enjoy the planning that goes into a trip - it makes the excitement last longer. You'd think it'd get old after a while and then by the time you actually got on the plane you just wouldn't be that interested any more. From limited experience, that just isn't the case for me. I first decided I was going to New Zealand a year before we actually flew. All that planning that went in beforehand just made it all the more real - proof that it wasn't just another daydream and that we were actually going to do it.

Never mind the fact that in the case of New Zealand and of the upcoming Ireland trip, the group planning sessions we had once a month or so were brilliant. Well, I say planning... more like spending half an hour or so actually planning and then degenerating into idiocy and over-excitement.

But still, sometimes I wonder if we're losing some of the fun of the actual travelling by spending too much time working out exactly where we're going to be each day and what we're going to be doing. There's always going to be that feeling of lost spontaneity.

Which is why, for The Grand Tour, I'm trying not to do that. Sure, I have a spreadsheet, but it's more about budgeting than planning. Sure, said spreadsheet has the amount of time I think I'm going to spend in each place, but it's all subject to change. I might end up somewhere and decided I need more time and I'm happy to just change the Plan if that happens. It's just a plan.

More important, with regards to The Grand Tour, is the budget side of things. Flights, transport, food, hostels, activities. Then there's all the things that I'll need to sort before I go like travel insurance and vaccinations.

Oh yeah. It might not be a set in stone "be here or else" plan, but all of my planning fun is still there to enjoy.