Tips for building an itinerary for a longer trip

For some people seven weeks wouldn’t be about slowing down, it would be about expanding the scope of the trip😀.

It sounds to me like you are on the right track with building in rest days, alternating crowded with less crowded places. Here is one possible idea. Throw a one week European Cruise somewhere in the middle. Complete change of pace and the chance to continue exploring.

My trips are different from what you are planning but maybe this will help a bit. Your process will probably be similar. Doubtful if it isn't too much different from what you do for your short trips, just not as rushed and more relaxed.

I travel just shy of a month, solo and the trip includes a RS Tour. With three of you and seven weeks, you probably won't include a tour?

First I start with where do I want to go, one country or multiple. I then look for a RS tour that incorporates part of that, trying to put it in the middle of my trip as a way to get from point A to point B and sights in-between.

I then add days on my own pre-tour and post-tour which determines flights outbound and inbound.

After that I start adding towns where I want to visit on my solo days and for how long. I map out my route using a map and Rome2Rio for transportation ideas. Mapping keeps the trip flowing and from being helter skelter. Since nothing's booked at this point I can change my mind about the whole or parts of the trip.

Next step is to write a rough itinerary so I backtrack as little as possible, wasting time, and get to see what I want.

Then I start to close up the times, not doing too much each day trying to limit myself to one sight a day, never more than two. I also give myself permission to cancel sights if I want a day/morning/afternoon off or am tired or ache/not feeling well. I learned my lesson last year on my first solo trip about booking too much each day.

I book flights early, then hotels. I want to know how I'm traveling and where I am staying. These are cancellable so I can change my mind if circumstances change.

About one to three months out, I start booking trains, sights/museums/etc. The more popular the venue the sooner I book.

Because your trip is longer be sure to take "a vacation from your vacation", ie relax and do nothing time. Hopefully your family is helping plan the trip. Have a great time!

I start by deciding on the area/country I want to see.

Then I do a lot of reading and making notes of specific sites I want to see or experiences I want to have in that area and then figure out an approximate number of days it will require in a base to accomplish that. For long trips like this, I plan less each day. Some days might be an early start but some are not. Then I like to add an extra day. So if I think I have 1-2 sites for 3-4 days, I will add an extra night with nothing on the plan for that day.

For lengthy trips, I do not count on travel day for anything but travel. For me, the key is to REALLY mentally slow down. It’s easy to say, but harder to do when you have been taking shorter, faster trips. Don’t plan every moment or even every day. But be ready with options. Be flexible.

I like to see a given country (or nearby areas of two neighboring countries) more slowly, in more depth - as opposed to running through a lot of countries just because it feels like you have a long time.

You definitely cannot go-go-go for seven weeks, so you need to allow for an overall slower pace. There are different ways to handle that. Many people like the vacation-from-the-vacation approach--a few days with nothing much planned at the beach, in a mountain village, etc. That would drive me out of my mind.

Other folks enjoy lingering over very nice meals and/or taking frequent breaks at a sidewalk cafe, so the average degree of intensity is at a level they can handle. That's not for me, either. I want to be either on the move, sightseeing, or relaxing back in my hotel room; I like good food, but sitting at a table alone for 2+ hours bores me.

My approach to avoiding travel burnout is to allow more time than most people would at each of my key stops. If I am feeling lazy in the morning (or having trouble with my sleep schedule--as I am at the moment, since I'm wide awake in Rome at 5:13 AM), I allow myself a late start to the day. That's usually easy to do since I pre-book only the absolutely essential activities. Since I don't do things like plan only two night in Venice or four in Rome, I know I'll still be able to fit in all my top-priority sightseeing even if I am not out the door on some days until 11 AM.

The way I approach where to go is by starting with my No. 1 priority, which might be a city, a region, or a small country. I do considerable research about what there is to do and see in and around that No. 1 priority. In particular, are there interesting side trips available from one of my likely bases that will be worthwhile and not require me to pack up and relocate. I form a general idea of how much time I'll need at each possible overnight base for a good visit to the area. I don't expect to get to every sight on my list, but I try to allow time to come close to that, realizing I'm likely to learn about new options as I continue planning so some things will just not happen in the end.

When I see roughly how much time I'll want in the No. 1 city/area, I subtract that from the total time available and ask myself whether my No. 2 priority is a logical inclusion. If it is, I do the same sort of high-level research for No. 2. And so on. As a result of that iterative process, I've made two long trips to France recently without spending one night in Paris. There just wasn't time left in either trip for a decent visit to that city (which for me would probably require something like 2 weeks).

I try hard to make my overall itinerary geographically sensible. I hate dealing with airports mid-trip, so I try to avoid flying unless I have to do so to avoid exceeding the 90-day Schengen limit or to be somewhere for a special event that's a major priority for me. There are always cities/regions/countries I'm very interested in that just don't fit into the current trip. I'm happy to let them wait until a later trip so I can give them the time they deserve, given my sightseeing priorities. Not trying to cram a week's worth of sights into a 4- or 5- night stay keeps my pace below the level of frantic.

For the first really long trip, a traveler should, early on, start a list of things that need to be taken care of prior to such a trip so there isn't a last-minute mad scramble to avoid disaster. That list would include figuring out things like how to have sufficient prescription medications, have mail held or forwarded, get bills paid, etc.

How old is your daughter?

Right here on this website, there is an entire section on trip planning.

https://www.ricksteves.com/travel-tips/trip-planning

How you plan your trip is completely subjective. Do you want to cram as much as possible in the seven weeks or do you want it to be leisurely?

Next, plan out an itinerary. Figure out where you want to go. Don't just go to the "bucket list" places but include less popular destinations that are of interest to you. Try to avoid too many "one night stands." They are time consuming and tiring.

Depending on the age of your daughter, which is why I asked, you may have to find particular things she would enjoy as well as what pace you can keep.

Once you've done that, then you can start looking at specifics like hotels, packing, reservations, etc.

You have plenty of time but it's never too early to start basic planning.

Thank you, these are great tips. I had never thought about including a cruise mid-trip, that is something to look into as a break, and potentially to see places that would otherwise be hard to get to. We haven't taken a cruise before. Acraven, I appreciate your insights on different ways to slow down. Sitting at a long dinner or sidewalk cafe works for us, but a few day break at the beach does not, I get bored sitting around! I really like the idea of adding cushion and giving ourselves the option of getting started later sometimes.

My daughter will be 18 when we go. She and I are planning the trip together. She's got some good ideas of places she wants to see, and she has experience picking places to stay, sites/activities, and restaurants. She hasn't put together an itinerary before. We are both really looking forward to this and have been talking about it as a distraction from the winter blahs.

Any place where you spend three nights or more seek to rent an apartment. Having an apartment provides a kitchen allowing opportunity to start the day with your own breakfast, taking a break from eating out and cooking some meals and gaining the experience of shopping at markets/grocery stores to create your own menu. You may choose to rent an apartment with a clothes washer and be able to do some laundry. Also provides some additional space to spread out and and experience some additional privacy. We like to select apartments with terraces on upper floors for the ability to sit and watch the local scene. Depending on locale you may desire to insure the apt has functioning AC. Stay off of busy streets (noise) and we research for non-tourist zone apartments to gain additional locale vibe. Often our landlord lends his expertise to helping find the tidbits of advice for placing to explore, shop and eat not found in travel guides.

Seek consignment shops for clothing shopping experiences. Wife loves seeing what fashions are available and often discovers a garment that not only wears great, but makes for a super wearable travel memory.
"Where did I get buy this blouse? Barcelona.", makes for a wonderful conversation months after the journey.
I prefer to seek men's leather belts and our daughters enjoyed the far lower prices for finding local fashion. Google searches will help you find the second hand shops.

Take a vacation from your vacation amidst all these weeks of travel. Seriously. Park and rest thou minds and bodies with time focused on local hair/nail/spa experience and a picnic. rest the feet and get your body out of the heat. Don't do beach? Find a local pool or explore Turkish bathes.

Take a break from each other. When have you spent 24/7 for seven weeks with each other without a break? Prior to departure discuss when it should be okay to go do your own thing (walk, explore a museum, shopping, whatever brings you some self peace of mind).

We have just started our nine week Spanish trip. Planning a longer trip was way harder than I expected and it took about eight draft itineraries to get something we were happy with.

We have ended up dividing our trip up into several shorter itineraries with a rest break (longer stay in an apartment) between them. It was much more manageable to plan in 15-20 day blocks. I also charted it all using a spreadsheet so I could give my partner a graphical overview of how long we were staying in each destination.

Planning when and how to do laundry was also important as neither of us is a fan of hotel sinks for doing laundry. We have an apartment stay or hotel very close to a laundromat around every 7-8 days so will only have to do minimal hand washing. As my partner goes to the gym at home four days a week I have also chosen hotels with fitness facilities.

We are on day 5 of 62 days and so far so good.

Perhaps fellow long term travelers can address how they approach packing for a long term journey?

It's great to have a longer trip, which will allow you to go slowly.

Paris will host the Olympics next summer (2024). May be worth thinking if you want to join or avoid it.

Some ideas for brainstorming. Examples are non-exhaustive. Just to illustrate the broad approach to planning.

Visit attractions/sights targeting domestic visitors
Europe has a fairly developed and mature domestic tourism market. By 'domestic', I refer generically tourists of the same country or nearby regions of another country. The offerings can be quite different from that to, say, North American visitors.

A lot of the second or non-capital cities have a lot to offer - Brno of Czech, Gothenburg of Sweden or Aarhus of Denmark.

When you visit these places, you will usually find fewer long haul tourists and fewer people speaking in English. Sometimes, that could mean prices are more aligned with what locals are paying. The tourism offices of smaller destinations may be positively surprised and more enthusiastic to interact with you.

You may 'discover' these 'offerings' by switching to the local language of the destination management office website. You may notice that the contents may be different or even more detailed. Google Translate or any other translate tools should allow you to understand what and where these sights are. Dig deeper with any maps (Google, Open Street).

Or check various sources. USE-it is quite a good resource curated by local youths. https://www.use-it.travel/home

Research what heritage sites local or Europeans celebrate

In addition to UNESCO World Heritage, there are many other heritage classification schemes. They reflect different values. Some are national, some transnational or international.

Council of Europe Cultural Route, for example, is a good place to start. Not all sites listed are necessarily interesting to visit or highly accessible with easy transport.

https://www.coe.int/en/web/cultural-routes/by-theme

Make good use of weekly or longer transport tickets in cities
A lot of cities offer weekly tickets at good values. Take Berlin and London as examples. The cost of travelling for 7 days is the same as that of 5 days. Basically, if you plan to spend 4/5 days, why not consider spending 7 days instead? The 2/3 additional days of transport cost might be marginal or non-existent.

Do you really need a national rail pass? Are there other train rovers covering a smaller region?
National rail passes are oft-promoted. They should be useful if there is a need to travel over a long distance and high speed rail serve the routes. If the plan is to cover a smaller region, there are actually lots of good regional rail rovers.

For example, Southern Day save rovers of the Southern trains can cover the coastal destinations pretty well, spanning from Southampton, Portsmouth to Rye/ Ashford. http://www.railrover.org/pages/southern-daysave.html

Each federal state(Bundesland) of Germany offers a state ticket.

Austria:
Link to the Carinthia freedom ticket
https://www.oebb.at/en/regionale-angebote/kaernten/freizeit-ticket

Perhaps fellow long term travelers can address how they approach packing for a long term journey?

Same as for a shorter trip. We pack enough clothes for six days and then plan when/how to do laundry. On our current nine week trip we have a few longer stays (4-6 nights) in apartments and one hotel two doors away from a laundromat. Hoping to only need to do infrequent sink washing of socks and underwear. We have packed wool tops which can be worn twice before needing to be washed.

My first post-retirement trip was 7.5 weeks, the very first trip in 1971 at 21 was 12 full weeks, solo, staying in hostels. The trips in between went from 3 weeks to 8 weeks. They were all in the summer. like that you are planning for next summer, minus one in Oct...a mistake

What should go into planning these trips? Some tips here.

More detailed planning, discipline in carrying out a doable itinerary, know your limits, above all , know your preferred travel style and level of luxury, ie what you rule out as options, how well , compatible are you with the person you'll be with, ie low maintenance or the opposite, determine the geographic breath of the trip, ie is it doable logistically, how much real estate are you covering, do you mind zipping back and forth on trains.

Most importantly, factor in downtime, know how to pace yourself.

Certain options I don't do on trips: renting an apt, VRBO, AirB&B, rental car, flying within Europe, etc.

It's all a personal choice. You don't say what a longer trip means for you, timewise.

I've no idea of your financial situation but a one week cruise mid trip (for three) would cost way more than the missus and me would spend on decent accommodation (apartments) for two months. No judgement call, just pointing out an option. Rent an apartment in a village for a week or two. Walk a lot, take long lunches in a good restaurant or in a scenic location (preferably both).

I'm hoping for an eight week trip next year (minimum six weeks), four bases maximum, about 600 kms between start and end points. Long hikes and lunches, a bit of sightseeing, mainly short and scenic driving, the odd town or city thrown in.

Since I retired in 2010, we have taken an average of two overseas trips every year. We have done three or four 7 week trips.
For example, four weeks in Wales and England, then a 15 day transatlantic cruise back to Florida (6 1/2 weeks).
Then a trip to Australia, New Zealand and a transpacific cruise from Sydney to Seattle (7 weeks).

We did a 3 1/2 week tour of China and Hong Kong; a 4 week tour of Kiev, Ukraine, Moscow, then river cruise to St. Pete, then a bus tour of Estonia, Latvia and Estonia.

More recently, we did a two week tour of Egypt and a safari in Kenya/Tanzania coupled with a week in Amsterdam (3 week total).

We are now in our mid-seventies and tend to prefer guided tours instead of doing a trip on our own.

We still don't just go somewhere and park ourselves at a beach or the mountains for our vacations. I have been to 81 countries and still want to see more places that I have not seen.

We often travel for two weeks and 3 weekends. Planning any trip longer puts undue strain on me. I plan my first week and my last week in detail--flying open jaw.

We now travel slower--trying to stay a minimum of 4-5 days in any large city. We also like to stay a whole week in an interesting place--preferably a farm stay where we can do day trips to interesting smaller cities in close proximity by auto.

I do like setting up general itineraries for weeks 2 to 6. And on the stops I plan to make, I will spend just a little time picking out hotels, B&B's or farm stays. I'll pick out one hotel and research a couple for backups--but not make reservations until a week or two ahead. Carrying a tablet allows me to make reservations in a much better computer format than using a Smartphone. I quit carrying a heavy laptop for obvious reasons when traveling.

There are some travel aids that were not available to me 50 years ago. The invent of the budget European airlines allow you to visit one region and then quickly fly to the other end of Europe quickly and on the cheap. Or you can visit one region and catch a plane to where you've never visited--at the end of your odyssey.

Another aid is to take an ocean cruise in the middle of your trip. We especially love cruising the Eastern Mediterranean and cruising The Baltics and Scandinavia. There are many other great places that can be visited by ship. And if you watch online cruise offerings, a week on a ship can cost less than a week on land.

Good luck in your long trip.

Denise, seven weeks sounds absolutely wonderful! When I retired, the trips did expand now to four weeks. I’m glad to hear that your daughter is interested in being involved with the planning, too. It will be a special time to anticipate the possibilities together! Our oldest daughter went with me to Italy last year, and it was such a special time in every way!

For my trips, I have four things in mind at first - timing, hobbies, locations & transportation times between locations.
Timing - when are festivals I might want to attend? Any dates I need to avoid a city?
Hobbies - what activities like music concerts, biking, or cooking classes could I incorporate? What’s something completely new to try?
Locations - which 1-2 countries do I want to visit? Where are the festivals located?

Transportation times - (this one will be less important for your greater amount of days.)

I make a visual help at this stage:

It’s a large piece of paper with the name of each potential city in their approximate location from each other. (Like a map, but without the map detail.) I draw lines between them and write on the line how many hours it takes by train between them. This helps to determine a route, or it drops off some that don’t make sense for the amount of time to get there.

At this point, I do lots of fun research! I look up lots of smaller towns between them to see if there’s anything interesting that would be great to see. Doing a Google “city & images” or the top sites on TripAdvisor will give you a rough idea whether to add the city name to this paper. This is how I found that I needed to add Le Mans to a French itinerary to stay at a charming B&B and explore their charming Plantegenet medieval lanes.

The second visual help comes as soon as I have a rough idea of dates from festivals, etc.
I make a large homemade calendar with days-of-the-week the size of Post-Its. Each city gets a different color, and those near lakes or ocean are blue. Mountain villages might be green. I’m looking for not only a variety in places but that the lake places aren’t all bunched together. (I think for a 7-week trip, we would want at least one week in the middle where we stayed in an apartment in a city for a week, so we could have lots of flexible downtime, if we wanted.). I start writing activities like museums, etc. on each day. The Post-Its make it easy to switch Sept. 4 with Sept. 5, for example. And I write the lodging at the top of each Post-It when it’s reserved, so it’s easy to see my gaps.

You’re not at this stage, yet, but I’ll just add a comment that the smaller, less touristy cities are so nice to visit! The prices for lodging typically are less in those locations, and the museums are wonderfully uncrowded. I vary the quality of lodging. I like to reserve a couple of really nice places in the smaller cities where it’s not as expensive so more money gives something very special and/or unique. Then I pick one in a city where it’s more expensive that’s more basic. It’s nice to have a variety. My trip with our daughter had basic hotels, a special hotel room, a grand room in a former palazzo, a B&B type, and an apartment. So, when you get to the stage of reserving smaller cities, look for some fun lodging!

I have taken several trips of about 10-11 weeks. The MOST important thing I learned the hard way in my very first 30 day trip was a rest day every two weeks. That doesn't mean just laying around in a hotel room, but it is picking a spot that is near water or a beautiful mountain view and just simply be lazy. Sleep late, take a leisurely short stroll for some breakfast, sit on a bench, a beach or take a boat ride. In the afternoon do laundry when others are out and about. Have a good dinner, take another leisurely walk around the area and relax some more. As the weeks go on it turns into a two day period from a one day for me. I know many think it is a waste of time, but when you are on a go-go-go schedule, and you will be, for weeks and weeks, your body will need to recharge. It is really just intentionally slowing the pace. Put this in your planning. Pick a place where you think having a "day off or two" would be enjoyable. It really works.

Thank you all so much! So many wonderful tips here, and great new suggestions I had not thought of. We have in mind a couple of beautiful places and adding 1-2 rest days at those is smart. Jean, your suggestions of how to visualize the trip planning are great, and perfect since my daughter and I are collaborating! This forum has such great insights. I can't wait to come back with a proposed itinerary to get feedback. This week I learned that some extended family may want to meet up with us for a week so that will add to the planning coordination!

On our most recent trip, we used

tripit

and upgraded to pro. It builds an itinerary. You forward your confirmations to a website, and they are assembled into an itinerary.

Generally works OK. Not sure if the upgrade is worth it.