Preparing to travel

Travel, especially if it is far and/or long, benefits from careful preparation. Our upcoming short trip to Europe required negotiating dates that worked around Callum’s school and motorcycling commitments. Then there were booking of flights and car, planning an itinerary from Paris to Sierre and back, and booking accommodation.

Our previous trips to Europe with grandchildren were linked to conferences for one of us. That usually entailed a few days at a conference location and a side trip to visit friends in Switzerland along with travel from and back to some suitable airport. In retirement there are no longer conferences but we still have friends to visit in Switzerland and our itinerary needed to deliver us there for a weekend.

Because our Swiss friends are French-speaking we have been using Duolingo to improve our French. That made Paris the most obvious starting point in Europe. Arriving there on Saturday evening allows Sunday to explore Paris before driving east on Monday. We will spend three nights near Lyon with days exploring the area and then drive on to Sierre where we will spend four nights visiting and enjoying local activities. From there we will drive up the Rhone valley and across the Furkapass and stay a night near Lucerne where we hope to catch up with other friends. Our last night will be near Dijon before we fly home.

I’ve plotted our intended route using Google Maps but how closely we follow that will depend on what interests us along the way. Accommodation is booked so those locations are fixed but the routes between and around them can be flexible and probably will be.

Preparation does not end there. I’ve been blogging these trips as we go. Prior to 2019 I travelled with a MacBook but since then I’ve been managing with an iPad Pro. Making sure that there is space to store necessary images and other files and that software for processing photographs and posting text and images to the blog is part of the preparation.

This post is mostly for the purpose of testing that the Ulysses app that I hope to use for blog posts is working correctly, including synching between iPhone and iPad when they are online and posting from either to the blog. I did try using it on a previous trip but at that time the licence I had did not support use on 2 iOS devices. The Setapp licence for Ulysses has been upgraded since then and seems to work smoothly across my Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Because it can post directly to WordPress that should be easier than my recent process using the Apple Notes app.

I recently cleaned out and reinstalled Adobe Lightroom on the iPad Pro so there will be some work to ensure that is working as I want it to and that it has any necessary presets installed. We have a few weeks until we depart on 9 June but there is preparation to be done.