crunchy parenting

Travel Series: Planning a Trip with Evernote « Evernote Blogcast

We recently took a road trip to Mammoth and having cleaned out my Evernote notebooks, I decided to get digitally organized for this trip. Years ago, I would print out all my airline tickets, rental agreements, airline car seat policies, contact information sheets. To keep it from being a mad bundle or from having to carry a folder around, I would fold each into eighths and write on the outside what each is. Stashed in one pocket, it would be easy to quickly grab the one I wanted and it was easy to keep them with me, no matter the size of my bags.

Of course, this was pre-iPhone days.

I’ve jumped onto the latest travel apps (iOS and web, even Blackberry), but other than using TripIt, I’ve rarely had an organized approach, until the last two road trips. It may not be classically crunchy, but if it helps you print out less paper, and stay relaxed while traveling knowing where everything is, I’m sure that helps in the parenting arena, too!

• Use TripIt. Really, it’s super easy. As you make your plans online, email your reservation details to plans@tripit.com. TripIt pulls all the information together into a cohesive itinerary for all your individual stays, rentals and activities. I’ll be honest that I’d only rate the email feature about 3/5. Even for major chains like Hertz, I often have to forward the email twice to get it to read it correctly. Annoying, but entering the details manually isn’t a dealbreaker for me, given the frequency of our traveling right now. Maybe later it will be.
• Use Evernote. I use Evernote as a general-purpose, but not-supersensitive filing cabinet. So I stash receipts there, but not passwords or account numbers. This trip, it was fantastic to create a travel notebook and use it for receipts and backup of the reservation confirmations. I also took pictures during the walkaround of the rental car and uploaded that, as well as taking a picture of the dashboard for the odometer and gas amount. Five days later, tired and driving home, it was easy to pull up the pic and figure out if we needed to put gas before returning. And it took me a second to do.
• Use FlightTrack. It’s available for iOS, Droid, BB and more. Gate info, delays, cancellations, maps: you name it, this will be your  go-to app for anything flight-related.