On a a trip this long and complex, there’s a lot to keep track of.

We’ll be making a lot of reservations and obviously spending a good bit of money. For where we need to be and when, we’ve started tracking everything in a calendar (Thunderbird) with the data stored locally as we won’t always have internet access. We’ve heard calendars are useful for such things. Turns out to be true. ;-)

But a calendar is not a good place to track expenses, so we’ve also started a spreadsheet to know what we’ve spent, and what we still owe as some reservations only require a deposit. Later, we will use it to track other expenses.

All of this is good, but it means that we are doing more paperwork (or, rather, the computing equivalent of paperwork) than you’d expect for what is essentially an extended vacation. It’s developing into a system so the time spent to keep track of things will decrease, but right now a surprising amount of effort goes into organizing it all.

Aren’t you glad you read this fascinating blog post about doing paperwork?

The place will get more exciting — a little bit at least — when we’re actually on our way.