Holiday Planning Tools

Trying to keep track of all the details for this holiday is quite a task - I've never planned a holiday before - we've never BEEN on holiday before as a family - at least not a holiday that was anything more than loading up the car with weekend-away junk and heading down the road.

This holiday required a lot more thought - passports! Airlines! Hotels!

I found a few helpful templates online but ended up taking the best elements of each and creating my own.

It may or may not be useful to others but I thought I might as well make it available to anyone who wants it - if you have not yet discovered the joy of Google Docs, now is the time! But if you prefer to use Excel or another spreadsheet program then this file can be downloaded in several formats.

So here it is - the Cafe Grendel Family Travel Itinerary Template - feel free to use and alter it as you require. (The link takes you to the Google Docs file).

And it looks like this (click to enlarge):

Two Weeks!

Just a little over two weeks till we hit the (insert appropriate geographic adjective of your choice) shores of New Zealand!

Naturally the Junior Grendels are reaching fever pitch of excitement - I am nearing a heightened state of panic as I try to cram a final post-grad assignment and three weeks work into two weeks of office time.

On the upside, Google have recently upgraded the Google Earth Imagery for parts of New Zealand - including Christchurch and there are now some spectacular resolution shots of the CBD that really show why it is such a gorgeous place to visit - of course Googling it is never quite the same as being there, so I am doubly glad we don't have too long to wait.

Google Earth is fantastic for trip planning however and it has been a great tool for finding points of interest to add to the GPS.

This latest imagery is from 9 March and is as crisp as you could ask for:

Say Cheese

A camera is pretty much an essential for us on holidays. Mrs Grendel is a scrapbooker and once she sets to scrapping a LOT of photos are required to feed her hobby.

Digital cameras are the ultimate device to support such a habit and we have access to an SLR as well as a borrowed compact camera for this trip. There is also the video camera to consider and I've gotten to the point where I think that three cameras is just ridiculous. Naturally each uses a different power supply and different storage medium (can't these guys just standardise already?).

At the moment the camera that uses SD cards is winning since we have more of those in a greater array of capacities - between 2 and 12gb.

I love the SLR but seriouly have to reconsider lugging it along on what is likely going to be an already overloaded trip.

My other consideration is that I want to blog both the holiday and New Zealand Coffee as we travel around which means I need to get the images off the camera and onto the internet.

I think I'll be taking the little green machine for that purpose - the XO laptop I bought under the One Laptop Per Child - Give One Get One program. It is light rugged and unique and I've been dying for an excuse to take it on tour.

It is Linux based so I am still learning the ins and outs of shifting images onto and off the laptop but should have it all up and running by the time we leave.

Google It

My colleagues are probably sick of that phrase but in my recent experience google has managed to put together a suite of tools that make holiday planning so much easier.

Google Earth is among the best of these – being able to actually look at the places you will stay or attractions you might want to visit is pretty cool, but also gives you some idea of the important things – like how far from the car park to the base of the glacier. This is an important fact because you’ll then know exactly how long you 5-year old might potentially complain for until that big lump of ice takes his breath away.

Also, which days is Mrs Grendel most likely to want to take a motion sickness pill prior to heading out onto the open road. By ‘open’ I mean the goat track crawling up the mountain with switchbacks that practically hang out over a seemingly endless plummet to the rocks below.

I’ve even managed to figure out where the nearest supermarkets and shopping centres are located – no small thing in itself.

I’m still looking for that map of toilets though!

Mount Cook as seen on Google Earth - yup, that's a mountain alright

Turbulance

Ok, it is more of a slight 'bump' in the plans. My instructors once told me that 'no plan survives contact with the enemy' well, the enemy in the case is the reality of air travel - sometimes flight schedules get shifted, and unfortunately this has happened one one leg of our trip. I've tried to book daytime flights to reduce fatigue on Junior Grendel Number One as he is unlikely to sleep on a night flight. Naturally the only change so far is that our daytime flight to NZ is cancelled and replaced with a nighttime one.

Best laid plans and all that.

I don't really blame the airline - but I have emailed them and asked for a bit more explanation as to why they want to complicate my life - but 'stuff', as they say, does happen, and this is definitely 'stuff'.

Now to get on with the task of shuffling hire cars and hotels to suit the new flight (pre-paid too, bugger. . .)

The Route

The family holiday to New Zealand will not be successful of the basis of the direction in which we travel, but I did want to make sure that we had time in some key places and had enough time to see some of the best bits - this meant missing some of the other best bits that are just too far off our chosen path to fit in the time available.

I hope though that this will whet the appetites of the Junior Grendels for further adventures. Particularly Junior Grendel Number One who has autism - we are not sure how he will go away from home for such an extended period but his natural curiosity and excitement for trip bode well.

Below is the general outline of our intended journey - I feel terribly guilty about the North Island - it almost looks like we are afraid of the sea and I know some amazing locations on both the East and West coasts of the North Island from my own time in New Zealand.

Still - we can't eat the whole buffet!

Exchange

Travelling from Australia to any of our near neighbours generally means we get a little bonus in the exchange rates. This is also true in New Zealand and one of our Kangas will net you about 1.2 Kiwis.

This looks pretty good and only improves when you start looking at the prices of items such as iPods - it'll cost you less to buy an iPod retail in Auckland than duty-free in Australia. That's not a bad indicator of how good we Aussies have it on a New Zealand holiday - accommodation is also a real bargain but bizarrely there seems to be not too much difference in the price of a room in a 4-star hotel and a cabin in a holiday park. I haven't quite figured that one out but low priced accommodation is possible if you are willing to sacrifice some comforts - like an en-suite.

Mrs Grendel has veto authority on accommodation so we are only staying in places that do not require exposure to the bracing early morning outdoor air in order to pee.

However I did canvass a number of options under NZ $60 a night for a family of four, all of which looked quite comfortable. On my last New Zealand trip I spent some nights sleeping in pretty rough conditions and managed to survive quite well, however when you are 18 your tolerance for such accommodations is substantially higher than at - well more than 30 anyway.

Still, while booking each accommodation I consoled myself with the exchange rate between our fair lands and thanked the central banking gods that we have never seen fit to link our countries more closely.

Plan it or go with the flow?

I'm a Go-with-the-flow kind of traveller, I like to be able to wander of the beaten track when something catches my attention, however the last time I did this was pre-kids and having children along actually requires some attention to the little things. For example, they are unlikely to enjoy sleeping overnight in the car between destinations. For that matter I suspect that I would no longer be very happy about this either.

I found a whole range of online planning tools (such as Jasons) for this trip and have tried most of them. I even found a service that can custom design a self-drive tour, book you accommodation and car and generally take on the burden of planning your trip. I got both a quote and itinerary from one and it was a fine piece of work. In the end though I decided that for all my flaws I'd rather do the planning ourselves (and have only ourselves to blame if it goes awry at some point - note how I've deftly slipped from the singular to the plural at this point. . .)

I've compromised settling on pre-booked accommodation but leaving each leg as short as I can so that we have flexibility for activities along the way.

I want to be able to stop and enjoy the view - after all it is not as if we have anything here in Perth that even resembles a foothill let alone a mountain.

SO basically we have somewhere to sleep each night, a good car to drive in, a map to show us where we are going (if he hold it up the right way) and new horizons to explore - beyond that what other plans do you need?


Does anyone have a map of toilets?

Skinny cash

Mrs Grendel I stopped eating some months back - well, not entirely, but enough so that we lose weight at a decent rate. This has also provided some additional disposable income and we had a nice tidy sum of savings in the back when I saw an ad for a snow holiday.

The Junior Grendels love the idea of snow - they've never had to endure the biting iciness of a real winter so snow to them looks terrific fun. I don't ski however and wasn't that keen on just going to the snowfields to pay a lot of money to watch other people ski.

We also have friends in across the Tasman and one day the inspiration hit "Lets do the family holiday in New Zealand!"

I started research the three main costs of a family visit - airfares, accommodation and transport. Daily food, fuel, activity costs and incidentals came into the mix later but I first need to try a few holiday options on for size.

Guided tours are right out - bus travel and Mrs Grendel are not friends and neither of us likes the on/off locked down routine of tours.

The most appealing option was to either hire a camper (vetoed by Mrs Grendel) or to hire a car and set our own itinerary. And thus it is that we now have both a budget and an itinerary, and tickets booked, accommodation paid for and a hire car to await us on our arrival.

The Junior Grendels have been saving coins to change into New Zealand money and I've been watching the exchange rate with interest hoping that it holds steady at the very least.

Buying the airline tickets was interesting but deserving of a post of its own.

The Plan

With the Global Economic Crisis in full swing, and new reports full of pandemic and woe, it was time to finally go on holiday.

What better time is there to stimulate an economy than when things seem at their worst, and what better place to visit and share our stimulus package than with our neighbours across the Tasman.

This is a logistical exercise of considerable proportions with children, and when you have a child with autism there are additional considerations.

However, Junior Grendel Number One is, in fact, very keen on the idea of souvenirs and travel on an airplane.

He's also fond of hotels (the kind with indoor pools and room service).

While our budget is unlikely to survive a full holiday in trans-tasman hotels, I thought we might be able to manage a night or two in something upmarket once or twice on our trip.

And thus was born The Plan.