Our Travel Tools

Within the Meet Us section, we introduced ourselves personally. In Blogging Biz, we take you through the business side of blogging.

“Our Travel Tools” is an opportunity to tell you about Travel Tug of War and help you navigate the most critical areas of our website. See what differentiates us from other bloggers and how we can save you time when planning your next vacation. Let’s get started!

Throughout this blog, you will find three primary publications: itineraries, travel guides, and in-depth destination reviews.

Itineraries

We believe trip planning challenges often arise more from failing to build in the proper logistics and the correct time-frames than identifying an area’s major attractions. Our itineraries strategically combine multiple activities with hotels and restaurants to ensure a seamless flow during individual days, an entire weekend, or a full-week vacation.

We’ve observed many existing “travel blog itineraries” are not really itineraries at all; instead, these articles contain a long list of attractions, and you’re stuck with trying to pull a trip together without the help of a true itinerary. At Travel Tug of War, we comb through the 20, 50, or 100 possibilities and organize our favorite picks into a chronological sequence that you can actually replicate when planning your next trip!

This travel tool can be the backbone for your vacation planning, dramatically reducing organization time while adapting these pre-planned schedules to your individual preferences. We’ve created a plug-and-play system so that you can easily add, remove, or substitute activities: upgrade your hotel, remove your morning activity to sleep in, or cancel your fancy dinner to satisfy a fast-food burger craving. Many of our itineraries can be combined, ensuring a steady flow from one state/country to the next. Endless possibilities!

Each itinerary begins with an overview, including S-C-H-O-L-A-R highlights for the entire trip (learn more below). Then, we proceed with day-by-day highlights and schedules. Near the article’s completion, we provide a unique summarized table which pulls the entire trip schedule together, including links to crucial vendors for easy booking. Accompanying this table, we also offer a detailed map with individual layers ordered to match daily schedules.

Travel Guides

Our travel guides are a close travel tool companion for the itineraries. We publish travel guides for both individual states and for countries outside the United States. These guides combine necessary information such as visa requirements, electricity/plug specifications, home currency and exchange rates, and unique bank holidays, with items that make a particular state/country unique: key sports events and teams, significant festivals, top entertainment venues, factory tours, popular attractions, and favorite local foods/recipes. While the necessities are essential, these other components can make your trip an exceptional overall experience (and an excellent addition to any vacation itinerary)!

Destination In-Depth

Destination In-Depth represents our traditional blog post, which offer detailed looks into national parks, museums, scenic drives, and even hotels. Each publications starts with a review of the What, Why, Where, When, and Who. The need-to-know travel tools right at the beginning… what a concept!

Many travel blogs are written by people in their 20s and early 30s. They may be solo travelers or young couples; they are likely to emphasize a specific activity like hiking, backpacking, or fashion; they could be thrill-seekers or digital nomads; and perhaps they stay in hostels or travel exclusively in an RV.

We are different. To repeat… we are different.

• We believe in designing travel tools for couples, moms, dads, families with pre-teens or teenagers, adult children, empty nesters, and grandmas and grandpas. We write this travel blog for you.

• As parents, you are busy at work and constantly running your children to sports games, practices, and other activities. You don’t have time for hours upon hours of travel research, but you want to create something special for your 2-4 weeks of annual vacation. We write this travel blog for you.

• Your children are distracted by their computers, video games, and mobile devices. You want the opportunity to reconnect or connect with your children at a deeper level. We write this travel blog for you.

• Your trip planning efforts have a defined budget for economic reasons, or to fund a second vacation later in the year. Still, you don’t want to skimp on a memorable experience, miss that great restaurant, or stay at that unique hotel. We write this travel blog for you.

• You are interested in visiting multiple cities, states, and countries. You need the right type of travel tools, including a scheduled itinerary that is diverse enough to please the entire family. We write this travel blog for you.

• You don’t actively read or follow travel blogs. You might not even know that travel blogs exist. We write this travel blog for you.

• Collectively, Missy and I have worked as accountants, financial professionals, Fortune 500 corporate employees, Wall Street analysts, and stay-at-home moms. We write this travel blog for you.

• We traveled as a couple before children, vacationed together as a family of four, and are now empty nesters traveling just the two of us. We have been in your shoes. We write this travel blog for you.

Balance is a word that we like to repeat over and over. Travel balance attempts to resolve the “tug of war” families encounter when planning a trip. Think of it this way: a family battle occurs when your wife wants to hike, you want to visit an art museum, your son wants to attend a sports event, and your daughter wants to go to the amusement park. Travel Tug of War strives to create trips that satisfy all constituencies and provide balanced activities throughout a vacation. Essentially, our travel tools seek to balance the indoors with the outdoors, cultural endeavors with adventures, education with simply goofing around, and high activity with relaxation.

As you consider building this balance into your trips, we encourage you to remember the acronym S-C-H-O-L-A-R. During your vacation planning process, S-C-H-O-L-A-R represents seven diverse elements essential to creating a balanced trip itinerary: Spectator, Culture, History, Outdoors, Lodging, Adventure, and Restaurants.

• Spectator – A highly under-appreciated travel pleasure. This can include sporting events, plays, musicals, concerts, festivals, and operas. Sports, as one example, offers a tremendous variety of spectating options: major sports teams/events like Real Madrid, the New York Yankees, French Open, Tour de France, or The Masters; significant events that geographically rotate depending on the year, including the Olympics and World Cup; following a favorite U.S. athlete now competing professionally abroad; or attending a locally popular event such as a minor league sports team, a state fair rodeo, or unique sports like ultimate frisbee.

• Culture – Culture and history may overlap, with both creating significant educational value. A cultural stop may include visits to the world’s grandest art museums, unique local exhibits, science museums, and influential religious sites. With these stops, you have the opportunity to witness what it means to be from different places with distinct beliefs, or to discover an appreciation for talented artists, inventors, and engineers.

• History – This second deeply educational endeavor involves visiting sites with major historical significance. History can include historical sites themselves: ancient cities, famous battlefields, and historic homes. History also consists of monuments, natural history museums, museums dedicated to specific time periods, and military parks or museums. We would also highlight unique factory tours, although depending on the type, this might also be categorized under Culture or Spectator.

• Outdoors – Like the culture and history categories, outdoors and adventure can have some overlap in attribution. For us, the purest standalone outdoor activity is hiking, but outdoor exploration through bike riding, enjoying a day at a beach, in the mountains, or on a lake would be traditional outdoor activities. A scenic drive up the coast, through the mountains, or across a desert also certainly qualify here!

• Lodging – Hotels can genuinely make or break a vacation. We have adopted a two-pronged approach to lodging: 1) seek out unique locally owned properties or smaller regional chains, and 2) stay at established hotel chains.

Local properties can bring the potential wow factor after walking into the lobby, entering the bedroom, or setting foot on the balcony. Sometimes, they are the central gathering place in small towns/cities and often have an excellent restaurant attached. They may bring a unique charm, offering something extra to your overnight experience.

When we don’t source an excellent independent hotel, we leverage large hotel networks. Here, we appreciate their reliability, consistency, and the value of their loyalty programs. We ultimately end up balancing these two types of stays across the lodging spectrum.

• Adventure – Adventure based activities typically occur in an outdoor environment but bring more intensity, perceived risk, or nuance than the outdoors alone. Examples would be mountain biking, horseback riding, surfing, skiing, stand-up paddleboarding, treetop rope courses, snorkeling, windsurfing, driving a snowmobile or ATV, whitewater rafting, sea kayaking, riding a Segway, hot air ballooning, ziplining, sledding down sand dunes, tubing, canyoning, riding an alpine slide, or attending amusement parks or waterparks. Here, the options are highly varied, with the offering uniquely corresponding with the local/regional geography.

• Restaurants – Identifying dining options is an often overlooked part of the travel planning process, but finding these regional food specialties should actually be a core consideration when traveling. When in Memphis, you should eat barbeque, but shouldn’t you also be looking for fried chicken and fried catfish? We think so!

And seek those out-of-the-way places: the best burger we ever ate comes from a Mexican restaurant in a small New Mexican town you’d never find unless you do significant advance research. Options might include formal restaurants, casual cafes, roadside diners, food trucks, fast food, or even a traditional mall food court. Travelers should also plan for snacks/desserts and identify key stops for the all-important ice cream, popcorn, pies, and cookies.

S-C-H-O-L-A-R is the fundamental building block behind our travel itineraries. Near the beginning of each itinerary, we walk travelers through the highlights of a 5-to-10-day vacation. These “highlights” are broken into the seven identifiable categories of S-C-H-O-L-A-R, creating a balance that will satisfy the unique preferences of every member of your traveling party. The successful result of a Travel Tug of War and proof that your family can Experience Everything during this vacation.

The following shows a partial excerpt illustrating the S-C-H-O-L-A-R presentation of an itinerary’s highlights.

After our itineraries, the next most comprehensive travel tools are Travel Tug of War’s state and country travel guides. If you’ve visited other established travel blogs, you’ve likely seen something similar. Like other blogs, standard information including airports, area, population, time zone, language spoken, currency, electrical plugs, holidays, and weather conditions are provided.

However, we also offer significant add-ons to create awesome potential upgrades to your cumulative vacation experience. We have a section covering top tourist attractions in the state/country, all national park system locations, UNESCO World Heritage sites, scenic drives, and even factory tours. Another section covers spectating options for you and your family, from festivals to beautiful/exciting entertainment venues to major/unique sports events and teams. These events can truly represent the best parts of your vacation, but are often overlooked by visitors or travelers may be unaware of these options during vacation planning.

Festivals and sports typically occur during a specific month or season. We make your travel planning even easier, by providing the approximate event/competition dates, so that you have better parameters when planning your vacation.

Here’s a small sampling of some of our favorite travel tools within these Travel Guides.

The most frequent posts on our site are within the Destination In-Depth category. The subject matter for these posts includes national parks, historical sites, museums, theme parks, hotels, restaurants, or other attractions.

Again, our presentation here is significantly different. We lead by answering the 5 Ws (What is the focus of your visit? Why should you visit? Where is the Site Located? When to Visit? Who Should Visit). By reviewing the destination this way, it places the most important travel tools at the very beginning of each article.

In these opening sections, we establish the reason why you should visit a location, how to get to the area (what airports are nearby, how close is it to other major cities or other attractions within the city), operating hours and how seasonality might impact a visit, and if the location is appropriate for children, adults, and even seniors.

Yes, of course, you can utilize each of our publications on a standalone basis. But really, they are at their collective best when accompanying other Travel Tug of War writeups.

Each Itinerary is supported by 3-5 additional Destination In-Depth posts to provide significantly more detail for many of the biggest attractions, activities, and other trip elements. While you can obtain great information in the Destination articles, toggle back into the Itinerary publications to learn how to best allocate your time in a national park or museum. Most of our Itineraries were not isolated trips for us but were part of a more extensive 2-to-4-week schedule. This means you can seamlessly navigate from one state/country Itinerary to a neighboring state/country Itinerary.

The Travel Guides are a different post type, lacking the precision of Itineraries or the depth of Destination articles. Our Travel Guides are truly a hybrid publication. For those unfamiliar with a state/country, they provide the necessary basics. And for the well-traveled, we are hopeful they will become the idea generators you can rely on, particularly for performances, events, tours, or games.

For an overall perspective, portions of our North Carolina Itinerary spotlighted the state’s mountainous western side. On one day, this Itinerary allocates your time along the Blue Ridge Parkway driving from Asheville to Boone, and on a separate day it offers help with budgeting your time at the Biltmore Estate. Our Itineraries also pull back the curtain and provide more extensive information on smaller attractions in each area and how to incorporate them into your vacation window.

While the Itinerary allocates your time, the deeper Destination articles will tell you everything you need to know about the Biltmore Estate, including its extensive history. For the Blue Ridge Parkway, you can learn about each stop-off, hike, scenic vista, and waterfall along your driving route.

However, each of these two publication types can only go so far. The Travel Guide fills in all the remaining gaps. What airport should you arrive at? What else should you do in Asheville (maybe suggest what foods North Carolinians like to eat or a good festival in the area)? The Travel Guide will also remind you that seeing an Appalachian State football game at The Rock is something to consider if your travel plans overlap the school’s Fall schedule.