For the most part I do the travel planning around here, and of course I love it. Recently I’ve been looking at how to get from point A to point B, when I know we would have a number of stops on the way.

How do I do it, you ask? (Yes, I can hear you talking … or maybe not. You decide.)

For one thing, of course, I google “possible itineraries” and plug in the cities. That is frequently not all that helpful, though. I also go on to the Rick Steves’ Forum Page and ask. Sometimes people there are extremely helpful. (On our last trip I had questions about trains and one person in particular was all sorts of help.) Sometimes I look up tour sites and see where they would take a group tour. (We aren’t group tour sorts, though, so that’s just to get ideas. Maybe some year we’ll end up doing one, but not yet.)

And then I always visit the Rome2Rio site. It’s really handy and they’ve fixed things so I can once again put in a number of cities (for a while that didn’t work and I had to piece things together a bit more). Last trip I put in each of our destinations in the order in which we traveled. Or what I thought we would do. Then it hit me that doing things in a slightly different way — and this change took us to Oban! — worked really well.

Rome2Rio will give different travel options: if flying is an option that will show up, along with the train (or sometimes more than one idea for the train route), but, or possibly a combo of plane and train or train and bus, or a car (we aren’t usually car rental types and tend to prefer the train) — just any way you can get to your next destination.

But what if I don’t KNOW where to stop? Well, I plug in the starting city and the next city I know we will visit. I look at the map and check to see what cities appear between those two spots. It’s pretty handy!

For instance you can see below a train from Amsterdam to Toulouse. I certainly wouldn’t want to be on a train for 9 1/2 hours, so why not put in a few stops and enjoy other cities as well if I have the time?

This is a fun thing to play with, and something I can do even when I have no trips yet on the calendar. (It’s so much more fun than house cleaning, after all.) I can get new ideas. I can then either save them on Rome2Rio, or just take a screen shot, as I’ve done with what I posted above.

So there’s my travel tip for today. And yes, I realize many of you probably already know all about this. But maybe there’s someone out there who doesn’t. You (okay I) never know!