Travel Planning

I am currently looking at arranging an extended trip for myself for next year. The planning and preparation for such a trip is extensive and complicated. I am going to keep diary entries of what is involved.

I have started off trying to put together a skeleton itinerary - itself not an easy task. My initial sketch shows that I need visas for 14 different countries; train tickets and a detailed schedule to cover the first month of travel; having to keep track of times expressed in three different timezones (Zulu time; Delta time; and Hotel time - otherwise known as London, Moscow, and Beijing time); and accessing many web resources - visa sites, travel sites, train timetable sites, and software sites.

The software sites are needed because I need computer assistance to put together detailed plans. I have started using Evernote - a generalised notepad that allows collection of miscellaneous notes into a variety of notebooks, along with snippets from the web and other sources. I am also trialling a scheduling application ScheduleiT to assist in putting together a detailed schedule.

So far I have tentatively allocated a start date in February next year; and started to sort out the first two legs of the journey - from Aylesbury to Moscow, and from Moscow to Beijing.