My Book

I haven't mentioned it yet, so I'd like to introduce you all to My Book. We had several books with us on this trip. A couple of Italy guide books, an Italian-English phrase book with translations, and then we had My Book. The nice thing about about My Book is that it has an elastic band that keeps it bound shut so that when I toss it in my bag or Cary's backpack, the pages wouldn't get torn or bent and nothing ever fell out of it.

I mistakenly called it the red book once, and Cary once called it the orange book and we didn't know what the other person was talking about. But if Cary called it Your Book and I called it My Book, we were straight. This little baby held our entire itinerary including print-outs of our flight confirmation (seen above on the inside flap), our 5 hotel confirmations, the distance between each city, train time and cost between each city, print outs of recommended things to do/see/eat from friends and family, phone number to US embassy (just in case), phone number to our credit card company, and blank pages in between each city's section to take notes for what we planned to do and what we ended up doing, as well as museum ticket stubs, hotel key cards, napkins with notes on it (Baccaro Jazz Bar) and any other keep sakes that I taped to the blank pages in the respective keepsake's city section.Here's the section for Roma above. Cary combined all of the recommendations we had and printed out the pages you see above, and I cut them and put each list in a separate section in order of when we would visit the city (Venice first, Florence second, Siena, Rome, Milan). I left a lot of pages blank in between each city section and ended up taping train or bus tickets (see above) or museum ticket stubs, wherever there were blank spaces.Here's the section for Florence. This is our hotel information (printed out and taped to the upper left side), arrival/departure date, confirmation number, address, phone number, written directions. Then I taped the key card to the empty page on the right.

When we were traveling in between cities, during the train/bus ride Cary would go through the guide book and recommendations and make a list of things to see and that's how we came up with our daily itineraries. You can see the list above. I taped mini-maps when I could find ones useful enough. This one shows our route from Milan Malpensa Airport to Venice by train. I also slapped in a tiny map of Venice. This was good so that you could get an overview of where you were arriving from, your hotel location, major sites, canals or rivers (depending on city), piazzas, so that you could start to get your feeling for where you were before getting there.

Another great thing about My Book, is that it is now a permanent keepsake. We took notes on interesting/funny/strange things we saw. So now that I've been blogging a week after getting home, I go through My Book and remember what we did and saw. I even sketched the statue of David in My Book, not that it's very good, but the fact that I was sitting in front of the David statue and drawing was pretty cool. I consider My Book just as valuable as the pictures in my digital camera.

If you're doing a multi-city trip, I highly recommend throwing together one of these My Books. I will never travel multi-city without a My Book.
_________________
*Edit*
1. Cary bought the notebook (that would become My Book) in San Francisco last December. I stole it from him.
2. Besides collecting all the recommendations and printing them, Cary did a lot of research for each city and organized all the recommendations by city and general area within the city.
3. This has nothing to do with My Book, but Cary was the navigator through the whole trip and was in charge of the map in every city we were in. I'd like to mention that he did an excellent job.