PLANNING A NYC GIRLS' TRIP

It wasn't my first trip to New York City, but it was my first trip since the pandemic, and I was so very excited to hit some of my favourite places and to discover some new ones!

Creating the Itinerary

In building an itinerary for any trip, I always start by figuring out our must-dos. By listing out anything that we'll be disappointed to miss on the trip, I avoid that terrible feeling of being on a plane home and realizing I never saw something that was important to me. Thinking these through in advance makes sure that we are prioritizing our trip highlights up front, and we know that if plans change, those are the important touch points to work around and reschedule. It forms the skeleton for the trip plans. In this case, our must-do list looked like this:

Steffie's Must-Do List

• At least one musical!

• Marie's Crisis Café

• Shopping in SoHo

• Delicious food and cocktails

Alicia's Must-Do List

• Walk across Brooklyn Bridge

• Rooftop drinks

• Central Park

• Carrie Bradshaw's Apartment

From here, I make us an itinerary and a trip map. I create them both at the same time, because there is nothing worse than planning something that looks good on paper but doesn't account for the very real travel time and distance between things. Having the map open and dropping pins on all your key locations helps to visualize what will actually work, and you can make sure you cluster all of each day's activities and restaurants and sights-to-see within a similar area of the city.

Once I've decided how the must-dos best fit into our stay, I start filling in the blank spaces in our itinerary with all the other possible things to do! For me, this means reading local articles and looking at local social media for inspiration. This is also when I start making reservations for meals. I do try to have at least one meal reserved each day, as a way of anchoring the day and of avoiding too many of those 'I don't know, what do you want for dinner?' conversations while wandering a new city. I love discovering places along the way, but the social proof of reviews and reservations in hand gives me some confidence that it'll be a great meal.

Here's what our itinerary looked like in advance of the trip. For longer trips, I usually organize in more of a calendar format, but since this one was just a little three nighter, just listing it all in a document worked pretty well.

And click here to explore our map. You can toggle through to see each day's plans. Anything with a green

icon is a must-do or a reservation-- a firm plan, if you will. Any other colours represent other possible options. Note that the descriptions about places on the map are taken from a bunch of sources and are not written by me, the map was originally just for the two of us to reference on the trip.

How do you plan a trip? Are you more organized than this? Less? Do you use similar planning systems?

Want to know what we ended up doing on our trip? Click here for the full recap, and here for the highlights!