RS Tour and traveling WITH your books

Ummm that's something to think about. Thanks

When I have a hard copy of a book, I use a razor blade to cut the book into sections and only take the sections I need. I take a plastic report cover like this one:
http://www.officemax.com/office-supplies/binders-accessories/report-covers/report-covers/product-prod2870118

and cut it down to book size. I put the section I am using that day in the plastic binder.

I've mostly switched to ebooks now on an Ipad.

We cannot yet provide e-books; they are sold directly by the usual e-tailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I do remove the chapters from my books that I'm sure I won't need. They pull out pretty easily when you flatten the book. Then, as I travel, I throw out other finished chapters. Or if you keep your book whole, you can "donate" it to a bookshelf at the last hotel in that country. Either way, no books are left at the end of the trip. Remember that bus-time driving toward your next city is prime time for reading ahead in the next chapter. If your trip in France happens to be circular, then you can leave a bag at your hotel to pick up later. Books usually do go in my airline carry-on bag, not checked luggage, along with other items that are valuable or hard to replace in Europe (like prescription meds).

I take guidebooks to Kinkos and have them cut off the spine and spiral bind what I need -- and I bind them in logical and manageable chunks. In addition to saving the weight, it allows me to combine related sections from multiple books, and I usually include a few blank pages for my own notes. This has worked much better for me than tearing pages out and dealing with the loose pages.

I've tried one RS ebook, but the one I got (iBook, Italy, a few years ago) had a non-functioning index, which meant searching electronically for everything. And that was time-consuming. They may be better now, but even if the index worked, it still would be more awkward than flipping through a book (in my opinion).

I make copies of the pages I want to take with me and throw them away as I go along. I don't copy the whole book, so yes, there may be more info I'd like when I'm actually there that I didn't realize beforehand but it's the price I pay for saving space and weight as I travel. I don't like to tear out portions of a book, I like to keep them intact for future reference.

All good ideas. Susan, I'm kinda thinking along your line. I hate to tear my books apart, not that if I ever used them again, I'm sure I would get an updated version. Making copies of the places we visit on our RS tour prob would be the best thing for me to do. Besides the books, we will have our tour guides with us. We are going to paris on our own pre-tour. I may take the whole book for that. There is a lot we want to do and may need more info. I will need to get to work and start consolidating. Thanks for all the info

I encourage you to bite the bullet and tear them apart. The paper is very thin and is much lighter than copy paper. The first time I tore sections out I had huge guilt!

With the RS books, I find it pretty easy to break the spine on either side of the chapter and then ease the chapter out. The sections sort of stay together if you do that. You can also not tear out the hotel sections to save room. I keep them each together with a small binder clip. If you do tear out sections, be sure to tear out the index, especially helpful in the big cities like Florence and Rome.

I also encourage you to leave the sections and BOOKS behind as you finish with them to lighten your load. This also will be hard to do but you will thank yourself for having done it!

I do the same as Susan, photocopy the pages/sections I want and staple them together in 'sections' of my own depending on where I am traveling or using as a home base. I do a lot of research online before I travel, too, and this allows me to print out the information have researched and combine that with the sections of the books I have copied into my own mini-guide book for each city or region we are going. Then I can just throw away the photocopies before I move on. It also allows me to save the guide books for planning and dreaming about my next trip, which happens frequently (the dreaming, that is) in our house.

All good ideas. I'm not sure I could part with the actual book. I need to go thru and see how much information I'm actually dealing with.

Ok....I have downloaded the RS audio Europe app and I see that some of the city side tours in the tour book are also on the app. I can actually follow along, almost verbatim, the tour on the app with the tour in his book. Has anyone done this and does it use up your iphone battery fast??

Diane,

If you're really concerned about the weight of the books, I agree with the others that you can simply remove the necessary pages and just pack those in your carry-on. If you'd prefer not to use Kinko's to bind the books, you could buy a few of the RS Page Binders and place the pages in that.

Another option would be to use a "combination approach". Take pages (or whole books) for the countries you'll be spending the most time in, and download a few E-books for the others. The Kindle format is very easy to use, and fairly inexpensive, while iBooks tends to be a bit more on the "pricey" side (and it doesn't seem to work as well).

Ken, that is another good idea. I didn't know RS had these binders. I need to see how much print I'm dealing with and figure out what will work best. Thanks

I find that the books work very well in Nook format. Very easy to bookmark, very easy to highlight, and 9 times out of 10 the links work too.

All good ideas. I'm thinking I may take my sections and put them in their own binders and just use what i need each day. We've not done a RS tour yet, so I'm not sure if we will get any more info while traveling, and I don't feel it will be as necessary to have all the info I think we will need, just because I would think being on a tour would alleviate some of that stress, but the four days we're in Paris on our own, I will prob try to take as much info as I can

Another tip that might help some people:

The maps in the guidebooks sometimes are a little small for me to read without reading glasses. For those maps that I think I might be referring to a lot (walking tours, restaurants, etc) , I use the enlargement function on my home printer/copier and make them close to 8.5 x 11.

If only it worked on my memory too.

Diane,

Is Paris the only place you might need a Guidebook for? If that's the case, buy a copy of the Pocket Paris Guidebook. It's small, light and easy to pack along while touring in the day. I packed one along when I was in Paris last year and it was a very useful resource to have in my pocket.

I also have the full size Paris and France Guidebooks, but I left those at home (and didn't have to tear the pages out of them).

Ken, paris is the one place we will be on our own. I pretty much have an itinerary drawn up for the four days we will be there. Yes, I do have the small Paris book. We will be on the road this weekend and I think I will take my travel books with me and go thru and actually see what sections I could take out. I like the idea of binding smaller sections. I will also look at my small Paris book and see if it has everything I think we will need. We have a few tours scheduled while in Paris. I prob won't take the actual tour script for those; the smaller Paris book prob will have everything we will need. This is Forum is a great place for ideas!

Look at the "Handy Extras" in the Accecessories section of the online shop. They sell a little cover/binder for the pages you pull out of your guidebooks. It has a slide clamp that is easy to use.

And don't cut the pages, pull them out in sections. if you flatten the book and grasp an entire section near the binding, and pull carefully, the pages will come out with binding intact. That is, the pages will stay bound together. I then slide them into a ziplock bag ( there is one size that fits perfectly) but next time I will get one of the covers they sell here.

The sections can be returned to the book intact when you get home. My 2010 Italy book has all pages returned to their original,place if I want to look something up later.

Copying pages is cumbersome and you end up with much heavier paper.

If there are just a few you could just photograph them with your iPad, assuming you will take that along on the trip.

Diane, I was assuming you are doing the fully guided 14 day tour, not the My Way tour, right? If so in my paltry experience of having done 2 RS tours, the guide will give you LOTS of information on what to see in your free time often in the vicinity of wherever your last guided stop is. If so, it looks like you have 1/2 a day in Paris, some free time in the AM in Beaune, full day in the Alps, 1/2 day in Munich, 1/2 day in Venice, 1/2 day in Rome. You will not need as much information for these time periods as you might think!

Now that we have you partially talked in to dis-assembling your books, lol, we will get you down even more as you sift thru what you might want to see in each city. You will not be able to see all the major sites in each place, so you will have plenty of things to see next time!

Pam, we will be doing the 14 day guided tour of Austria, Germany and Switzerland. We decided to fly into paris on the front end and spend four days there then take the train to Trier to meet the tour. I think I've spent more time arranging our paris pre-tour. I won't need to being some info since we have a few tour booked there. I try to. E organized but not that it's getting closer I need to get really organized.

Thanks to Ken for inserting the link to the RS mini-binder(above). I had not seen those before and I very well may try them for my next trip. That is what this forum is all about ---sharing information with other travelers.

Oh you are going to have a good time! I really want to do the GAS tour...maybe next year. So sorry about assuming you were doing the 14 day out of Paris. Still, look at where your free time is and then pare down to just which chapters you need for those days and maybe some background info on the other days.

Hi gang,

I'm getting excited for my trip to Munich on Friday (the 11th). I wanted to share an idea that I'm very pleased with -- I tore out the pages from the larger Germany book that I needed (Munich and some day trip ideas) and took them to Kinkos, where I had them spiral bound. The book is now about an inch think and the perfect! size It cost less than $5 to do and will be easier to manage than the loose pages and a binder clip.

It was a weird feeling but for my last tour France, I did have Kinkos unbind the book. I took the pages I wanted and 3-hole punched them, then put them into a 5" x 8" leather binder. I added lined pages for notes/journal, 2 zip pockets for receipts and admission souvenoir tickets, 2 clear sleeve pages where I folded the pages of tour member list-hotel list-my itinerary, and 3 dividers that had open sleeve pockets on each side for maps, misc.

The binder kept everything neat and organized in one place but was a bit heavy addiiton to my boarding bag. For the bus I kept it inside a 2.5 gallon ziplock bag which became a drop zone for anything I had in my seat: sweater, snacks, sunglasses, etc.
I pulled out sections when needed and placed them into a quart zip lock baggie to keep in my shoulder bag. This worked great for the rainy weather days.

Next trip I plan to try the spiral bound method. I think you need to try the different methods out before you decide on a lasting approach to how you'll travel in the future.

I think I will find a place (We don't have a Kinkos) that could spiral bound a book for me. I may try this with one of my books and if I like it, I will go ahead and have the other books done too.

Diane, get ready for some gorgeous days in Switzerland during the GAS tour! We're heading back to the Lauterbrunnen area this Fall after being there 11 years ago on the GAS tour during our 25th anniversary.

The purpose of the RS tour book is for a better experience on your trip. This book isn't sacred! Tear out pieces, write on it, whatever helps you have a wonderful trip. We carried it in our suitcase and ripped out the 1-2 pages we needed for the day, or we just made a list/addresses of where we were going for our free days on our own. Personally we prefer a Google map to the RS maps (we're both engineers), so we printed those out for the towns, too, and would mark on them ahead of time.

I definitely agree with taking the RS Pocket Paris vs. the regular book, and the Metro/city map in that book is small enough to not scream "tourist".

Enjoy your trip!