Suzy Homeschooler

How to Make a Family Travel Guide

I’ve written before on living a life of adventure regardless of where you live and how tight your budget may be. We have just moved to my husband’s home-state and, in an effort to get me excited about the area, Marmaduke purchased me a guide book with many historical and natural must-see sights. This got me thinking about a handy little DIY travel guide that I made when we lived overseas.

It took a couple tries to figure out the best way to keep all the info for fun activities organized but once we figured out a method that worked for us, planning our weekend excursions became so much smoother.

I will definitely be creating a new travel guide for our new home, but until then here is a sample page from my old travel guide.
Note that it includes all the pertinent information that might be needed to plan a visit.

In the top right corner you might notice a colored dot. This dot tells me about how far away the place is. Places with a green dot are very close, places that we can probably go to on a whim. Places with a yellow dot are a bit further away, we might want to wake up early and drive out for a full day-visit. Places with a red dot are the farthest away and will likely need a bit of forethought to visit.

While I realize that many people don’t think twice about how they get around, our family isn’t so quick to get into the car. When its possible we like to ride the train or even walk. For this reason I make note of the various transportation options and approximately how long certain options might take.

At the very bottom of the page I leave a place where I can make note of whether or not we’ve visited this place before and, if so, whether or not we enjoyed it. No checkmark  means we haven’t been there, a check+ means we loved it and a check- means we hated it.

You might also note that each page is actually a hole-punched index card and they are kept in a binder. The binder is useful because it means I can rearrange the pages, putting the places we enjoyed most towards the front and the places we didn’t enjoy towards the back.

So what sort of places are in our travel binder? All sorts of places. Some we found by Googling “things to do in…” followed by the name of a nearby town or our state. Some we found by word of mouth, locals who gave us tips on places we should check out in the area. We try to make sure we’ve got a good mix of fun and educational, indoor and outdoor, free and paid entry, etc…

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