So, I had my basic outline of our trip planned out. Since I felt pretty good about it, I started entering everything into my tripit account. I LOVE tripit.com. I have used this site for 3 trips now, and it is so helpful and amazing. You can input every possible thing you would need all onto 1 itinerary. SO GREAT!! It also keeps a record of how many miles and what cities you have been too. Best of all, it is FREE to use! They do have a version that you can upgrade to for $50 per year, but honestly, it doesn't have anything that I need on it to make it worthwhile. I'd rather stay with the basic version. Another neat thing about tripit is that you can add travelers to your trip and they can access the information. You can also share your trip with non-travelers. This is a great feature because I am able to have everything all together and sent to anyone that would need to know where we are. On this trip, I sent it to my mom, Shane's mom and Caylie's dad. Anytime we travel over 300 miles we are required to provide an itinerary to the other parent so that they know how to contact us in case of an emergency. This is so much better than having to type it all out in an email.
After I got all of the stops entered in on the appropriate days, I began adding our driving directions. It wasn't long after I started that I realized there was another deal that I wanted to purchase. This would cause some major changes. I looked at the whole trip overall and started moving things around to accommodate it. Then, as I was going over all of the changes, I realized that one of the deals I purchased could only be used on certain days...so that caused even more changes.
Finally, I got frustrated and said to myself that I needed a break. I would come back to it the next day. The next day rolled around and I started printing out all of my deals. That's when I realized that the first deal that caused all of the trouble, wasn't even going to be available until AFTER our trip. Luckily, instead of it being a "1-day" deal, it was a "3-day" deal and I was still able to cancel my order and get my money back.
I cannot stress enough to make sure you read every single word in the deal restrictions. I was almost out of $15 because I didn't realize there was a redemption window on it. I saw the expiration date, but not the "you cannot use this before" date.
So, here I was again..back to square one. Trying desperately not to lose my mind. I began shuffling things around again.
Honestly, I'm kind of glad in a way that I wasn't able to use that deal. While I know Caylie would have really enjoyed it, it really was going to cause us to be on a tighter schedule than I liked and a bit more driving that we really wanted to do.
So finally, I felt confident that my itinerary was not going to have any more drastic changes and I sent out the email links to everyone that needed it.
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