Every Trip We Take Starts as a Google Doc

Every trip we take starts as a Google Doc. There are sixteen of them now, sitting in a folder titled "Trips", with names ranging from the merely descriptive ("KL IND HK 2026") to the actively unhelpful ("Thailand says PHOOKET"). The names don't matter. The structure does.

The structure is roughly the same every time. A one-sentence thesis at the top: why we are going, what we want the trip to feel like, what specifically we are optimising for. A budget with real numbers, not aspirational ones. A day-by-day itinerary that includes travel times between places, because the difference between a day that works and a day that doesn't is usually a two-hour transfer nobody costed. A restaurant list that starts from Eater's Essential 38, then goes deeper: interviews with chefs at those restaurants about where they eat on their days off, cross-referenced against local food Substacks and blogs written by residents rather than visitors. A packing list. A booking checklist with a column for "reserved" and a column for "paid".

The process runs weeks rather than days. The bones get done first: flights, the hotels that book out months in advance, the one or two restaurants that need reservations before you've even decided which day you're doing what. Then the middle scaffolding: the routes between cities, the transport bookings, the second-tier hotels. Then the refinement: the specific restaurants, the specific stops, the specific day each thing happens. By the time we land, the doc is somewhere between forty and eighty hours of work, depending on the trip's complexity.

The doc is not the itinerary of a rigidly-planned trip. It is the removal of the small decisions so the trip itself can be about the things worth deciding. When you have already decided lunch is at MTR in Bangalore, you don't spend the morning debating where to eat. You spend the morning at the flower market. When you have already decided where to sleep for six nights, you don't spend evenings on Booking.com in the wrong end of a city. You spend evenings where you meant to be all along.

This is what curation is at the personal scale. Most travel writing treats the choice between "book everything" and "roll with it" as the only options: either you pay an agent to make a trip for you or you don't decide anything until you're on the ground. Both of those trips end up not quite being yours. The trip that is yours is the one where you have done the work of caring about it in advance, so that when you are there, you can be there rather than researching.

The Google Doc is the artefact of the caring. It is also, in retrospect, one of the most useful ways we spend evenings in London before we leave.

We can share templates. We probably won't.