Girls Trip Out West 2022

​Planning a trip can be overwhelming and stressful, or it can be fun and exciting. It’s all up to you! I have had my fair share of being overwhelmed and anxious trying to plan a night out, let alone trying to plan a vacation. Trial and error, and lots of grace though have saved me and given me the tools I need to make planning fun.
 
First off we all know it is so much easier to plan for yourself, the minute you add in a spouse, friends, kids, or family all the extra layers can be suffocating. What does so and so want to do, will they have fun, will they feel seen and heard, will this cause an argument, and the list of fears goes on and on. I’m here to tell you to take a breath, sit back down, and know that you can do this successfully where everyone has a great time. 

Girls Trip 2022

We have done small trips before, short cruises, weekend getaways to an Airbnb, and day trips for lunch and escape game just to name a few. However, when Haven and Emily sat us down to say we are turning 25, we want to go out west and we need you to come because we don’t know how to plan this trip, I felt immediately excited, and then looked around to see who on earth decided I was qualified to plan said trip. Just because I have traveled more than you doesn’t mean I know what I am doing, but I guess I’ll put on my big girl pants and figure it out. And figure it out I did.
After months of deliberating and talking loosely about one day when we get to go, the time had come to start making decisions. And this is where my not so expert, expertise kicks in. Below you will find my 6 Steps for Fool Proof Vacation Planning.

6 Steps for Fool Proof Vacation Planning
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(If I can do it, you can too!)

1.Make your dream list / itinerary first.

Start by writing down everything you and your travel buddies want to do. EX. . (See High School Musical filming location. Go to Disneyland. Hit up Vegas. Eat in-n-out burger. Hike somewhere incredible. Attend a show taping in LA. Do a studio tour.) This is your dream list, so dream big!! This list doesn’t have to be feasible, affordable, or even remotely sane.

2.Pick Dates.

Depending on who you are traveling with, this step may or may not be important. When Chandler and I travel together we pick everything we want to do and then choose whichever dates accommodate those things. – In this case however, traveling with friends, we had to pick dates that worked with four different work and family schedules. This meant that the dates were going to dictate more of what we were able to do, due to their lack of flexibility.

3.Set a budget

Regardless who you are traveling with, DON’T. SKIP. THIS. STEP. It is very easy to quickly blow your budget on things that are seemingly unimportant. Then you get where you are going and somehow forgot that, oh yea I have to pay to eat while I’m here. Not ideal!

4.Book Travel Accommodations

Once we had picked dates flights were the first thing we set out to book. Knowing what time we landed and were coming home dictated hours on travel days that we had to play with. This was a jam packed trip and every minute counted toward the fun that was to be had.
Think about how you will be getting around once you arrive at your destination. This will help you decide on hotel location, and accommodations. Free airport transportation and breakfast included was on the must list for us.

5.Plan each day.
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 Winging it is not recommended as a rule of thumb. Have a plan on the calendar for each day, even if sometimes that means a date on the trip just says “Relax” or “Do Nothing”. Having time intentionally set aside to do things you want to do, or even time set aside to rest, in some cases, holds you accountable to make sure the things on your agenda get done.
 
Once your days are arranged, it is time to start booking tickets if necessary for whatever is planned. Make sure if you are doing multiple things in one day you account for travel time between activities, as well as enough time to actually enjoy the adventures you have planned.
 
6.Let the countdown begin!

Once you have your dates picked, travel accommodations arranged, calendar put together, and tickets purchased it is time to sit back and enjoy the fun parts of planning. Do heavy research on the things you are interested in. Places you want to drive by, restaurants to eat at, pictures you want to take, and memories you want to make. 

We made a date and right there in the middle of Blue Coast Burrito I whipped out my handy dandy notebook and presented the girls with the Dream Itinerary, and it was just that a true fantasy. I already knew that we all collectively were dying to live out our middle school dreams of seeing where high school musical was filmed. Haven wanted the magic of Disney, Emily wanted the adventure of the great outdoors, and Julie, our resident pop culture enthusiast, would want to see a filming of a show, and all I really cared about was making sure we ate good food. I remember seeing mouths drop open, and eyes widen, this was definitely a combination of excitement for the trip, relief that they weren’t the ones planning it, and the fear of “holy crap what has Hannah gotten us into and will I have to sell a kidney to make this happen”. Why not start big though? You can always scrap things as you go, and plans become more concrete.
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The next item on the agenda was picking dates, and oh man what fun that was…. Feel my eyeroll!! Between two teacher work schedules, babies, spouses, other planned vacations, vacation time accrued, and the summer birthdays this whole trip was planned for, we are lucky we found dates that worked at all!! Once dates were picked it was time to talk Hannah back down to earth. Obviously everything on the dream list couldn’t be done for the most pressing concern, cost. Once a budget was set it was easy to mark things off the dream itinerary, that was like 9 days mind you, to accommodate a more reasonably priced trip. This also helped to decide what time of day we needed to book flights in order to have time to fit everything in, and also have time to sleep.

We had four itinerary options that made it to the final drawing board. All the differences boiled down to which option gives us the most time at each place. Things to consider were which weekend day are the Disneyland parks open longer, what days of the week is the High School open for touring, will we be too tired from travel to enjoy the parks on this day. Making a calendar is like playing sudoku. Some things only fit one place, and other activities seemingly fit everywhere, but eventually all the puzzle pieces fit together.
Below you can see the premade calendar that our trip was based on. As you can see this is a loose outline of the things that we did. 

Girls Trip Calendar

Day 1

• Fly: BNA – PHX – SLC
• Hotel Shuttle
• Comfort Suites Checkin

Day 2

• Rental Car Pick-up at airport – Via free hotel shuttle
• High School Musical Tour

Day 3

• Checkout of Comfort Suites
• Drive to Hurricane UT
• Sand Hollow Resort Checkin

Day 4

• Checkout of Sand Hollow Resort
• Fly: LAS – LAX
• Hotel Shuttle
• Fairfield Inn and Suites Checkin

Day 5

• Checkout Fairfield Inn and Suites
• Trip Advisor Tour pickup at hotel 8:30 am
• Tour starts 9:30 am (8 hours)
• Uber to Disneyland from Farfield Inn and Suites after tour
• Disneland Checkin

Day 6

• Disneyland (8am – 12 am)
• California Adventure (1pm – 10pm)

Day 7

• Breakfast at La Brea Bakery Café 11:15am
• Hang out by pool
• Fly: LAX – BNA

It’s the moment you all have been waiting for, sitting on the edge of your seat, biting your nails….. drum roll please!!!! Here is what we actually did each day! If you are planning a quirky trip out west here is a guide to get some knowledge from.

Girls Trip Itinerary

Day 1

• Travel day

Day 2

• Pat’s BBQ for lunch (SLC) -DDD
• Toured East High
• Drinks from SWIG - Instagram
• Visited the Salt Flats – Recommend by a friend
• Red Iguana for dinner (SLC) - DDD
• Crumble Cookies for dessert

Day 3

• Ruth’s Diner for Breakfast (SLC)
• In-n-Out for Lunch (Hurricane)
• Sand Surfing at Coral Pink Sand Dunes - Instagram
• Rooster Run Café to go for dinner

Day 4

• Hiked the Narrows at Mount Zion National Park – Instagram
• SWIG and In-n-Out for lunch
• Walked part of the Las Vegas Strip

Day 5

• Full-Day Iconic Sights of LA, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Beaches and More – Trip Advisor

Day 6

• Disneyland and California Adventure for 16 hours!

Day 7

• Shopping in Downtown Disney after brunch
• Pool Time

​If this part of the planning is the most overwhelming to you maybe you need to view it from a different perspective. While activities and food are accessories to a well planned vacation, they can be hard to pick out. My tip is to use your resources! For example, when I think of places to eat when we travel my first thought always is I wonder if Guy Fieri has been there? So what do I do? I pull of the Diners, Driveins, and Dives website. Every restaurant featured on the show is organized on the website by state. This is a great place to start and get ideas. Then you can read restaurant reviews and see if it is a reasonable distance from where you will be staying. I also use Instagram heavily for restaurant finding. Every city has a self-proclaimed “foodie” with an Instagram. Using the search feature is practically fool proof to find someone who lives where you are going and eats out a lot. Don’t eat somewhere that you can get at home when you are on vacation. Make sure you eat places that create memories and a longing to go back. Most of the time you already have some idea of what you want to do when you are going on vacation but it is always fun to hear what other people have done when they went. I promise if you start dropping in conversations that you are going to “insert city” someone you talk to has been there before, and they will happily fill you in on their favorite things they did. There are numerous experiences we did on our trip that we simply learned about by talking to people we see all the time that had, unknowingly to us, been there before.
 
Just like that my friends, a trip was planned, and the vacation of a lifetime was taken. We will have memories that last forever and hours of sleep we will never get back.
 
I love you. Say it back.