Quote Originally Posted by CalOldBlue View Post
Sounds like you are capturing the same stuff I am. Here's how I get to 31 tabs:

One tab for each 'transit day'; broken into legs (e.g. Lake Havasu to Oatman, Oatman to Hackberry, Hackberry to Seligman...) with miles and times and 'dwell time' (expected time spent at the stop at the end of the leg). I have 11 of these. Each leg is summed at the bottom for total miles/time/stops for that day. (See 'overview' tab below).

One tab for each multi-day stop; things to do/see, restaurant options, etc. (For one-night stops this info is typically squished into the transit tab for that stop). There are 6 of these (Flagstaff, Gallup, Tucumcari, Santa Fe, Monument Valley, Death Valley). Tucumcari due to the short stay and the plethora of shots I want to take. Don't have one for Santa Monica as we'll just wing it.

Calendar tab. Looks like a page from a monthly calendar... overview of where you are on any given day.

Reservation tab (hotel, car, airline, other things reserved ahead of time; includes budget info).

Overview tab (driven automatically from miles/time/dwell information in the individual transit day tabs; as I change these it auto-populates the Overview tab... which is where the information in my original posts was derived).

"Climate" tab (likely weather for each location for that time of year). Useful when it gets time to finalize the 'Packing list' tab.

Sun/Moon tab. Already discussed.

"Gottados" (things I need to do before we leave; e.g. pay bills).

Packing list.

House sitter instructions (to make sure our boys don't forget to water the plants).

Contact information.

Sometimes there'll be a tab for local loops at a multi-day stop or complex drives in a transit day; e.g. if we're going to make a loop out of Santa Fe there'll be a 'transit-day-like' tab. I have one of these to break down the timing through Petrified Forest... lots of places we COULD stop, need to budget our time. This tab drives the details for one row of the Flagstaff to Gallup tab, which then feeds the Overview tab. (Yeah, I used to be in IT and have a decent comfort level with Excel basics.)

Other one-off tabs for a particular road trip as needed. This one has a 'Gas' tab so I don't forget to gas up prior to a long drive through nowhere on the way to somewhere. Lots of emptiness between Santa Fe and Bluff, and Barstow and Needles.

CLEARLY over-planning, but I want to make sure we have a place to stay, are not rushed yet can see the critical things we want to see, and arrive before dark. I used to do things like pull into a foreign city and expect to score a room at the local tourist office, until my then-wife and I arrived in Koblenz after the tourist office closed and I had to wander the streets looking for a 'Zimmer Frei' sign. Never again (fortunately I had four years of high school German to fall back on).

My most insane tab ever was a 15-minute by 15-minute view of how we could be spending our 4 days in Dublin. Did we follow it to the letter? No way; but at least we could review how we were doing against our 'must sees' and adjust as needed.

I got to this level of planning due to over-packing things into one too many vacations and being spoken to harshly by Mrs. OldBlue. So rather than being a Sherman's-march-to-the-sea (how Mrs. OB to this day refers to our honeymoon in England 18 years ago), I have a better understanding of what is feasible, and what is abusive. We adjust on the fly... this plan is just 'indicative'.

I don't recommend this level of detail unless you really enjoy this level of planning (I do), and understand that it is a tradeoff of spontaneity for certainty: it probably works best the older and less flexible you are. Think of it as a packaged tour where you have designed the package, and then become the tour guide that executes it.
Thirty-One Tabs! That is impressive! I might steal a tab or two! I do the Calendar for cruises and post it on the wall of our cabin. Makes it so easy to see what's coming. I always leave room for things we want to add. Otherwise I take my calendar in the RV. I'm a visual person! ;) I don't have a tab for reservations, but they are listed on the spread sheet and I do print them out and keep them in my binder.

I will now try to impress you with what use to be our Camping Checklist. In 1986 when my son was only 10 years old he wrote a check list program for our Commodore 128 computer. It had three lines in the header that I could customize, it sorted everything either by "Items" or "Location in the RV" and I would print it out both ways (no laptops or cell phones back then!) and that first year there were 228 items listed and the last time I used it there were just over 400 items! When we changed to a PC computer my son updated the program for me. I used this program for the 10 years we had our travel trailer and the 13 years we had our first motorhome. We pretty much keep the motorhome stocked now and we've been doing this for SO long and SO often, we remember what needs to be added besides the clothes and food.

Now that we are retired and have all the time we want, we're not as scheduled as we use to be in the days when we didn't have much in the way of vacation days. Now I even add a rainy day to pretty much each location we plan to stop and sometimes two if we're going to be someplace for longer than a week!

We use to not even make reservations but that's not an option if we want to stay in National Parks, State Parks, popular places or if we go with another couple. For our upcoming fall trip we have reservations for the first month because we're going with another couple and to popular destinations. We will be parting and for the travel days to our next destination, we won't be making reservations, but for the State Park and National Parks after that we do.

Utahtea