The Official Trip Binder

The official "Trip Binder" is ready to go. For those of you not familiar with this concept, the Trip Binder is a 3-ring binder containing all the important pieces of information that will make our trip the absolute best that it can be. When you open the binder up, the first thing you see is the Trip Itinerary. At the top of the itinerary is the same header you see at the top of my DisneyAdventures.info website. Below that, I've included our plans for each day of our trip. For our travelling days, this includes our beginning and ending destination, the total number of miles we will travel, the estimated travel time (according to MapQuest), the name and phone number of our night's lodging, and the confirmation number for our reservation. Once we arrive in Anaheim, the itinerary includes the name of the park that we intend to spend most of our time that day, the operating hours for bothparks, the time of any priority seating reservations we've made, and any other special plans we've made or confirmation numbers we need to remember.

After the trip itinerary, the binder is divided into five sections, with labeled dividers separating each section. The five sections are:

1. MapQuest Info: contains driving directions to our different daily destinations, as well as directions and locations of various services we may need. Some examples of the different services are banks, fast food restaurants, stores, and Starbucks.
2. Confirmations: contains printouts of the official confirmations for our hotel reservations, annual passports, etc.
3. RideMax Plans: contains the schedules for two days of touring plans that we created using RideMax, a ride planning software tool. See an earlier post for a description of RideMax. Since the park shouldn't be too crowded, we just developed plans for one day at each of the two parks and will wing it the other days.
4. Park Tips: contains a collection of tips gathered from my two favorite Disney websites, Mousesavers.com and MousePlanet.com that will help us make the most of our vacation. For example, you can get free coffee refills all day at the Market House restaurant in Disneyland by saving your receipt. You don't even need to save your cup. Also, Annual Passport holders (or AP holders) can get a free The Incredibles Halloween Trick-or-Treat bag by presenting their AP's at a shop on Main Street. It also contains information about the best place to get cash, what discounts for dining and shopping are available to AP holders.
5. Other Info: contains mailing address labels for family members to make it easy for us to send postcards, a couple of empty plastic sheet protectors to hold receipts, and any other information that doesn't fall within the parameters of the other sections.

My son kind of smirks when I talk about the trip binder. My sister commented about someone having too much time of their hands when I whipped out the trip binder on our trip down to Northern California a couple of weekends ago. It doesn't bother me. I know the binder will make things go as smoothly as possible and enable us to have the best trip ever!