Planning on Spain

I'm knee deep in planning our upcoming trip to Spain and finding it all very difficult. This country frustrates all my attempts to plan out a logical route. It doesn't help that we are flying into and out of Madrid which lies smack in the middle of the country.

The distance between some places makes some travel times prohibitive. I've all ready had to make the decision that Santiago de Compostela is just to far away to logically fit in. That does frees up a couple of days for other places though.

Also, my parents are meeting us there for the first week or so, which means I have to coordinate with their schedules as well.

I have never had this much trouble trying to map out a route before. If anybody has any suggestions, please feel free to pass them along.

New York

We're heading out on a red-eye flight tonight for our trip to New York. I plan to update my twitter account from the road and possibly a photo or two as well. If I get ambitious, I might even do a blog post or two.

Trolley

This is one of my shots from our trip to Yakima. There is an old trolley that is still running as a tourist attraction, but it has a lot of history behind it. And it was a lot of fun.

Google City Tours

Google has come out with a seriously cool new tool called Google City Tours.

You enter a starting address (or even just a city) and it finds points of interest and maps out a three day walking tour. You can add and subtract sites, but can't seem to change from walking to driving directions. Still I think this has great potential.

Now if they could combine this with the custom maps feature in Google Maps we'd really have something here.

Wine-soaked Weekend

We are freshly back from our wonderful weekend in the Yakima Valley. We spent three days there and went to 13 different wineries and that was but scratching the surface. We will definitely be returning before too much time has passed.

And when we do we might just stay again at the Birchfield Manor. It was a little pricier than the places we normally stay, but we had a large jacuzzi tube in our room and the outstanding breakfast was included.

We also ate dinner there on Saturday night, and if you are in the area, I highly recommend the experience. The food was outstanding.

We took a short ride on the Yakima Valley Trolley as well, which was a lot of fun.

Our favorites of the wineries we visited were: Sagelands, Gilbert Cellars, and Windy Point. Although we bought some good wine at a few others as well (particularly the Grenache at the Alexandria Nicole Cellars.

I'll be posting pictures from our trip soon, so check back often.

Tripit.com

I'm constantly on the look out for new tools to help me organize our travels both before and during a trip. And I've posted about my love of the iPhone and the many apps that make it useful on trips (here and here). Not to long ago I came across the site TripIt.com and instantly knew I would be adding it to my arsenal.

It's great for organizing all the different pieces of information that go into the make-up of a successful trip. And the best part is how much of it is automated. For example: after booking a flight, I forward the email confirmation from the airline to tripit.com and it formats it and adds it to my itinerary. The same with hotels if you are staying at a somewhat major chain (which we rarely do), otherwise you can add reservation information using a template. You can add notes, web site links, articles, events, car rentals maps, directions and more.

They also have a free app for the iPhone so you can access your itinerary on the go. And if you don't have an iPhone, you can print out your itinerary at home.

So if you are planning a trip, I recommend checking it out.

Update: I meant to say that as much as I love the web site, for viewing your itinerary, the iPhone app is actually better. It's easier to see where one day stops and the next starts. The web site could do with a little more definition between days.