3 Stress Free Travel Tips

 April is Stress Awareness Month and my goodness, I have been acutely aware of stress in my life lately, especially in reference to our upcoming travel plans! So, I'm sharing some of the tactics we use to reduce stress when it comes to travel. Feel free to add yours in the comments!1. Take screenshots. We are so incredibly dependent on our phones and rightfully so! They are such a powerful work horse right in our palms! But! There is nothing worse than any these 3 things happening: you have no cell service, your phone dies or you can't find the website you found 3 weeks ago when planning your trip. An easy solution: take screenshots. Take screenshots of maps, attraction addresses, details, restaurants, places you want to go or see, your itinerary, hotel address, ticket confirmations, etc. This way, you aren't eating up your data (especially if you are out of the country), draining your battery or wasting time searching for a particular site. You can easily scroll through your photos and refer back to it as many times as necessary, this way you save your battery and data for those emergencies where you really are lost or really need to find the nearest gelato shop! Bonus: If you are a memory keeper, you'll be able to remember the exact names of places you go or other particular data about sites you see!

***To take a screenshot on your Iphone press the round home button at the same time as the 'sleep' button on top of your phone

2. Only have one scheduled event per day. Traveling is one of the most unpredictable situations we willingly put ourselves into. And it never plays out exactly as we plan. Flights get delayed. We get lost. Kids get tired. There is nothing more stressful than the feeling of running late and having no idea where you are going. Seriously, just thinking about it I feel a panic attack coming on. The best way to reduce stress and enjoy your travel is to have no more than 1 scheduled event per day. This in no way means do only 1 thing a day, just do only 1 thing on a timetable. If you buy tickets for a show, don't also sign up for a guided tour that's only a few hours before. The tour will run long and you're antsy the whole time for it to hurry up and end and then it will end on the other side of town and you will have no idea how to get to the show from there and then the subway will be closed and you will really have to go to the bathroom and now you are really late for your really expensive show you were really looking forward to. And you're hungry. So, when making your itinerary, pick one time sensitive activity to do each day, then plan your day around that. We always have a list of WAY more things to do than we will ever have time for. On purpose. If our scheduled event is on a certain side of town, then we will scour our list and find things that are on that side of town to do that day and we will do as many as possible until time for our scheduled event. These things are normally free and aren't the most important thing we have to do, so no stressing if we only get 5 minutes there or don't make it at all. Because, in the end, we went to our scheduled event, which was the most important thing to us, and we were on time and had plenty of time to enjoy it.3. Pack a snack. This sounds like a no brainer, but when you don't have your fridge or your local grocery store at arms reach it is much harder than it sounds. There is nothing worse than the hangries. Hunger makes people do and say terrible things they wouldn't necessarily do otherwise. I remember as a child my father complaining to no end about how 'eating was more expensive than the whole *%&% vacation". Sound familiar?! Parents of small children are good about always having snacks on hand for little ones, but we often forget about ourselves. The people who can't just pass out in a stroller and be wheeled around like a pharaoh....We never travel without a hearty supply of crackers, trail mix, snack bars and water. This reduces the hangries, excessive spending and frantic searching for somewhere to eat. This small bit of preparation allows for you to really seek out that authentic, hole in the wall, gem of a restaurant that your mouth will salivate over years later. Or else you'll eat at a KFC. Please don't do that, pack a snack.Update: Dropcam is collecting a series of these tips and making an ultimate Stress Free Travel List. So go check out their ideas and add your own in! More here.