How to Daydream & Plan Your Next Trip

A year later and the struggle is still real for many of us.

We don’t have an exact date for when Covid will release us from her grasp for good, (if we did, I would be marking my calendar and setting Google Flights alerts), but we can still plan ahead for when it will be safe to travel again. No reservations booked, but still planned and ready to be made when it is safe.

Instagram & Save

If you use Instagram solely to engage and promote, you’re surely missing out. Instagram is an amazing app for planning and daydreaming. Similar to Pinterest, which we’ll discuss next, you can save posts into different collections. I have collections for every country I want to visit. Within each of those collections, I have other peoples posts from places I want to visit in that country. It’s an awesome way for travelers to not only decide where they should go on their next trip, but also see what places they’ve decided they’d want to visit based on someone else’s pictures.

The way you find posts to save to your collections is very easy as well. You could just save posts from people you follow, however, we’ll say you want to visit Moscow, Russia. Start a collection by either going to the “places” search or search tags such as #moscowtravel. You can get as specific or obscure as you want with your searches. Once you find a place you want to save, click the bookmark icon on the bottom right of the image. Click save to collection and there you can either make a new collection or add it to one you already have. If you want to access your collections, go to your profile and it should show “Saved” under your bio. If you don’t see it there, go where you would check your settings and a few lines below it you should see “Saved.” 

Pinterest

Pinterest has been used mainly to save recipes and plan home renovations. But why not use it to daydream about all your future trips and get inspired? Pinterest actually has a big travel community making it super easy to discover new places. A few things I love about Pinterest:

1. You can start a board (similar to Instagram collections) and title it the country or city you are hoping to visit. Making it so easy to find in the future when you actually do get the opportunity to visit. I’m a sucker for organization and love when I can go back and easily find things I might need months down the road.
2. Most pins are linked to websites and the original source. This is awesome if you want to do more research on a place! Click the imagine and you might be taken straight to a travel blog with a whole lot more information or an article on the top things to do in the places you want to visit.
3. Some pins are like mini guide books or brochures that already have the top places to see listed out for you. So convenient!
4. The pictures you can find are absolutely gorgeous! You’ll definitely be daydreaming for hours on Pinterest. Click here for a board of some of my favorite travel pictures.

Read Blogs

If you’re reading this, you’re already on the right track 😉 Reading travel blogs of another persons point of view is a wonderful way to fantasize and start planning your own trip. Sometimes reading a trip someone else was on will help you daydream about what your trip will be like and all the things you’ll do when you finally get to go.

Personal travel blogs are filled with unique perspectives, stories, and advice which makes researching the same place more interesting. Another benefit to reading blogs is you can contact the writer directly to ask them any question you may have on a place or even just general travel question. A lot of us are more than happy to help and talk to fellow travelers.

If you find that the travel blogs you are reading have useful information for you that you want to save, there are way to save the url links so you can access them later. Lifewire.com has a post on 7 popular ways to save links for later. Or you could go really simple and make a word document with a bunch of pasted URL links. I would do that with recipes in middle school before I discovered Pinterest. As we discussed before, you could also pin any image from that post to a Pinterest board and save the link that way. Just click the image from your board and you’ll be redirected to the blog post. 🙂

Clip out pages from magazines & newspapers

This one’s kinda old school but I’ve actually been doing it during lockdowns. You know those free one year magazine subscriptions you get from your frequent flyer miles? Well, I had piles of magazines thanks to that which I never had the chance to read before. It’s actually really relaxing to sit down and skim through a magazine when you are sitting at home most of the week.

If you still pay to get a newspaper delivered to your house like we do, go to the travel section and clip out trips, tours, guides, or coupons you are interested in. It’s so old school but it’s fun to make a little scrapbook or dream board of the places you want to visit from newspapers and magazines. It’s the perfect daydreaming activity!

I would love to know what you all have been up to since the travel bans? Are you guys daydreaming and planning already? Are you doing other things such as starting Youtube playlists? Let me know in the comments. 

-Ayla ♥

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