As you may have noticed from my past few posts – all things travel is consuming me lately. I haven’t been posting much as I’m currently planning my next holiday! I’ve never left planning a trip so late because I didn’t think international travel was going to be possible this year. I normally plan an international trip 6 – 9 months in advance and I’m doing this one (albeit it’s much shorter at only 3 weeks long), 3 months in advance.

There are so many things to research, plan, compare and organize so I decided to do a categorised lists layout this week. I have 2 bookcases of planners from all of my reviews over the years, so instead of using a printable, or one of my checklists or project planning books from Agendio, or using the same type of dashboard weekly spread I often use, I decided to take a completely different approach, and make use of an old planner from 2017 – the Dabney Lee for Blue Sky.

Blue Sky no longer appear to be collaborating with Dabney Lee but their Day Designer Collab planners have a similar layout (as a side note I love basically anything by Blue Sky Planners, see some of my reviews here, here and here.

Before the Pen

After the Pen

I used whiteout tape to cover up the dates, then converted the daily boxes into sections for general to do’s plus things to check / research for each destination I planned on visiting. Kind of like my master task list in excel where I’ll then transfer tasks to my weekly spread, I have a master to do list for organizing the whole trip in my travel planning spreadsheets, then pluck out the things I need to research and add them to my weekly spread.

As I’m researching, I’m adding notes to my itinerary template.

I’m a bit OCD about things being color coordinated. I was going to use the Poooliprint to quickly make some text label stickers but unfortunately the Poooliprint can only do black and white and I wanted navy to match the colors of the planner.

Green and navy is a color combination I like, but it’s rarely used in planners and it can be hard to find stationery (highlighters, sticky notes etc.) that coordinate. I have plenty of navy pens but getting the right shade to match was difficult. I ended up settling on the PARKOO gel pen and wrote over the white letters for the days of the week. It’s only noticeable that it’s a different shade of navy if you look closely.

I considered alternating the green and navy for each checklist but I’ve done that for other spreads and it ended up looking too ‘busy’ so I just left it blue for the headings and green for the lists. I went back and added some weight to one side of the letters to make the titles stand out more.

As you can see, I didn’t bother re-dating the planner or having specific sections for each day.

I shared a list of specific things I research / Google before a holiday in this post. Some of the things I was researching this week from that list include:

• 1 / 2 / 3 day itineraries for each destination
• Best day trips from each destination
• Viator for tours – they now mention who the tour company is so I usually go and check the companies website for more details. This is the most time consuming part. I could spend up to 3 hours researching one day tour I want to do if there are so many companies offering similar things – checking reviews, itineraries, departure and pickup locations, duration of the tour etc.
• I’m intending to spend no more than 3 – 4 days in each city so I really need to check if day tours are offered every day or only certain days of the week, there’s also the issue of seasonal dates in Alaska as I’m visiting in shoulder season and some tours close early or have a reduced itinerary
• Flight times – direct versus connection. E.g. I can get a direct flight to Anchorage, Alaska from Portland or Seattle but not from Vegas. I want to visit Portland and Seattle anyway, so I switched the dates for those cities around to avoid wasting 4 hours on a layover in a city I was going to visit anyway.
• I find planning a USA trip much harder than planning a European holiday. Things are more spread out and you really need a car to get around. You can’t just jump on the train or walk everywhere and there is no way I’m driving on the other side of the road so organized day tours it is
• Autumn colors – I think I’ll just miss it as I only have a short window of time I can take this trip and it will probably be too early for most of the places we are visiting

More travel planning tips

• Travel Planning: 50 Things to consider when planning an itinerary 
• 115 Things to Google before your next vacation
• How I use Excel to organize all my travel plans (research, itinerary, hotel, tours, bookings, packing list etc.)

Supplies Used

This list contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase after clicking one of these links I’ll receive a small commission in exchange for referring you (at no extra cost to you).

• Dabney Lee for Blue Sky collab planner (see my review in this post). More Blue Sky Planner reviews here
• MUJI Hexa pen (dark blue) for my list titles
• Zig Clean color dot marker (see my review here)
• PARKOO Gel fine point pen (0.7mm) in green and navy (PARKOO pen reviews in this post)
• Officeworks whiteout tape

I was going to use washi tape to divide some of the boxes into smaller sections but didn’t end up needing it. The washi tape I found that coordinated best was the navy from this 3mm set and the green from this solid rainbow colors set in either 3mm or 5mm.

Related post: 7 Ways to use dot markers in your planner or bullet journal

Would I use this planner again?

Not sure. I’m trying to use some of my older planners instead of buying new ones all the time. This planner is 8.5 x 11″ (US letter size) which is normally too big.. but I actually needed the larger page size this week.

I like the navy and green but I wouldn’t want to use those colors every single week. Horizontal is an easy layout to convert into lists so maybe I’ll take a similar approach to hacking a different planner in the future.

I did this spread for travel planning but you could easily hack any planner (and almost any layout) with whiteout and adding some stickers over the top to use it for lists or project planning.

Past weekly spreads

• My Top 10 Favorite Weekly Planners (after reviewing more than 200 planners)
• Using my custom Agendio Planner (would I order from this company again?)
• Converting the Day Designer daily into a weekly planner

Planning tips

• 5 expensive pen brands that are worth the money (I have no regrets for splurging on them!)
• 7 Useful washi tapes for bullet journaling
• 10 Quick bullet journal dashboard weekly layouts

Liked this post? Pin it!