How I Used Evernote to Plan a Camping Trip

When Travel Templates Turn into Team Building

This last weekend, I co-led a group of ten guys into Anza-Borrega Desert State Park for a men’s retreat overnight as part of the Men’s Ministry on my campus. However, the last couple weeks have been extremely busy for me with traveling to visit graduate and law schools and with Easter break along with the worst travel day of my life, things had been a little stressful, and I hadn’t been fully focused on my ministry.

Our primitive campsite for the night

So, about nine days ago, I realized that my ministry partner and I had yet to plan, market, and get sign-ups for our camping trip that we’d been telling everyone to save the weekend for. This was just as I landed in Chicago with my girlfriend to visit our grad schools, and I wasn’t expecting to work on the trip.

But I happened upon Evernote’s Travel Planning templates, and everything actually became a lot easier. Here’s how I used these templates to my advantage:

1. I used the Trip Planning Template to plan the overall structure of the trip.
2. I used the Daily Itinerary Template to plan out each day in detail, adding maps, routes, and all other information necessary.
3. I added Note Links within the Trip Planning note to all other information I may need, such as the Budget Proposal, saved receipts, and the sign-ups document.

The Trip Planning Template

This was probably the most helpful template for me, because of how little time I had to plan everything. The template gave me the structure, I simply had to fill in the information.

The Trip Planning templates that I used as my general Camping Itinerary

I had been to this State Park before, and was fairly familiar with the various sites it has to offer its visitors. So I did some research online, confirmed our campsite location, and found the various activities I thought would be interesting. I then used Evernote Web Clipper to save the information to Evernote, and linked to those notes in the main Camping Itinerary note I had created.

The Daily Itinerary Templates

I took the information I’d collected in that note, and organized/scheduled it into the weekend with a note for each day’s itinerary using the Daily Itinerary template. Here, I placed images of the routes we’d be taking, general schedules, and planned out meals.

Because of the structure of the template, I felt like I was just filling in small bits of information, but when I had finished that, I actually had a complete trip planned! While the templates did contain a lot of superfluous areas for my needs for this specific trip (we weren’t staying in hotels with confirmation numbers or dining in various restraurants) they certainly helped — I couldn’t have planned this trip as efficiently without them.

A couple screenshotes from the Daily Itinerary. I used Evernote’s annotation feature to label each screenshot and put the drive time directly onto the image.

To download these templates for yourself, head to the Evernote Blog!.