There is seven weeks to go today until we start our ten week trip to the US, Dominican Republic and Caribbean. Whoo hoo!!
It’s been a busy couple of months. I have been completing my last semester of my teaching graduate diploma which involves quite a few assignments and my final three weeks as a student teacher in a high school. Not particularly fun, and it has meant that our trip planning has basically been forgotten. It is mostly over now though, so I am back on the wagon.
We have already booked quite a lot. I think everything that we want to book beforehand. At the moment, I am going through checking all our bookings and printing them out and answering any questions we still have about them. I am also working on our itinerary document that I make with ideas and practical information for every place we might visit. It is already 44 pages long! No one could ever accuse me of not being organised! I have also watched some good stuff on youtube and the travel channel about places we are going.
I thought I would write this entry with some links to some sites that I am finding useful to book, plan and research this trip. This will be a bit random though, as I don’t remember everything I have found useful, but here we go.
Contents
Accommodation
For longer stops, I have been looking at apartment rentals and have booked through:
Airbnb
Trip Advisor/Flip Key
For shorter stops:
Expedia
Super8 (can see all Wyndham chains on here)
and individual motel chain websites
Car hire
I used soooo many sites to determine best deal, and for us, it was booking with Hertz direct and paying in advance. It gets complicated with additional charges for insurance, loss damage waiver, additional driver and two car seats that we need.
I used the following sites to get some information about basic road rules:
USA Child Safety Seat Laws
USA General Road Rules
Google maps has come in very handy to work out some itnerary ideas and stopovers, so we get a better idea of how far we are happy to go in a day/over the 3.5 weeks.
Attractions
I have looked up individual attractions after reading the relevant Lonely Planet, reading blogs and googling activities for children in whatever destination we are going.
YouTube
Bit random but I enjoyed this documentary about Haiti and Dominican Republic on the weekend. It’s specifically about people of African descent in these places, but it covers a lot of history of both places and about how the countries are now and is very interesting.
Haiti
We actually did consider going to Haiti since we are so close, but after some brief research, that seemed like a very bad idea. Unfortunately, the country seems like it’s a mess and not a suitable place to take little ones.
Tags: Dominican Republic Travel Blog Haiti Travel Blog USA Travel Blog
