Hey Party-Makers,

if you’ve been reading regularly, you might be wondering if this blog is still a partnership between me and Ben. And to answer your question, it TOTALLY is. There’s just one of us that has a little bit more time than the other to sit down and write regularly (that’s me, Mary). However, behind the scenes of Heart of Celebration Ben is typically the one who helps come up with ideas, does a LOT of the heavy lifting in our parties and events, and makes sure our website and technology is running smoothly.

Recently, we started planning a short family vacation and as Ben started working on the details, I realized this sort of thing would be the perfect first post for him. Ben is in his complete element when it comes to efficiency and planning, and this vacation he’s truly outdone himself to get us to all the right places. If you love techie finds, football news, and like to be in the know of nerdy happenings, you can follow Ben more closely at his brand-spanking-new twitter here. And if you see things there that you would like to read about on HOC, let us know! And now, without further to-do, here’s Ben.

I don’t know about you, but I like to have an idea of what to do and where to eat before going on vacation. It’s not that I have to have every meal and day planned out before I get there, but I want to have my top lists of places I want to see and restaurants to eat at (I’m married to Mary, so duh). I think we can all relate to being at the mercy of google/yelp on hungry stomachs in a new city. This too often turns into a “I don’t care just pick a place” scenario that doesn’t end up satisfying anyone.

This time before going into Seattle we did a little bit of homework. Here are a couple things we did to prepare for the trip:

1. We are using AirBnB to find a local home to stay at instead of a hotel. This is our first time staying at an airbnb, but it has some perks over a hotel, in my opinion.  First you get a more local and neighborhood experience of the city, so you get the opportunity to check out the neighborhood coffee shop or bar.  Case and point, when researching the neighborhood we’re staying in, we found a Turkish restaurant a few blocks away (huge gastronomic win in our house). You also can find just about any type of amenity you may want in a vacation getaway (we have a hot tub and a fully stocked kitchen), and it can be a great solution for larger groups. If you want to give airbnb a try, feel free to use our referral link which will give you $35 off your first reservation.
2. Ask for suggestions. Yes, I use google and yelp with the best of them when it comes to looking up “best brunch” or “best happy hour”, but there are many gems and hole in the walls that get overshadowed by search algorithms. Before this trip, we asked around to our friends who live or have lived in Seattle, to get their favorites from the city. This gave us a lot of great recommendations that we have never heard of before, and it will make sure we have somewhere else to go besides the space needle this year.
3. Compile a list. It is great to do your research before packing your bags for your vacation, but if you forget to save your restaurants and things to do somewhere, you can end up in the same situation once you get there. We used Apple notes this trip to organize everything, but if your not in the Apple ecosystem, you can easily do the same thing in another notes application like Evernote or OneNote. That being said, there are a couple new features in Apple’s newest software release, iOS10, that makes this easier than ever.
   1. The first is note sharing. This is a feature most of us have become used to with something like google docs, but in iOS10 you are able to share and collaborate on notes with other users making it great for capturing everyone’s ideas for the trip. It also allows you to make sure everyone has access to important things, like your AirBnB address, and links to restaurant menus and locations.
   2. The other feature I loved while planning this trip is the rich links that can be copied into your note. When you copy a link from a browser and paste it into the notes app, it will now give you more context on the link and usually an image to represent the link rather than just the plain old blue plain text URL. That is not the only way you can get these rich links. If you are in any app, and you see the share icon in the app, you can save a rich link to your notes app. Some of my favorite apps to utilize this from are maps and yelp. When you share a page from these apps, it will give you a link back to you search in the app as well as a great visual link for your notes. If you are like me, this allows you to scroll through your note and just by the different visual links be able to more easily decide on your next stop.
4. Organize your daily needs in the city. I made a list of all the meals we have time to eat while in Seattle, and organized our note based on breakfast, lunch and dinner restaurants. I also included activities for our in-between-meals time, and spread out the activities close to the restaurants we’ve chosen to eat at.

And there you have it, our steps to planning a vacation using the smartphones we already have at our fingertips. We’ll make sure to keep you updated after our vacation on how effective this method was for getting us well fed and well traveled.

Mary-Beth Johnson

Mary-Beth is a creative, food-obsessed, Georgia transplant living Chicago. She is proudly and fiercely Latina, and more specifically Chapina. In her day to day she is a food educator to students around Chicagoland aged 3 to 80+, both virtually and in-person. She is passionate about cultivating the truth that every person has an understanding of food that deserves being brought to the table, and that time in the kitchen can be sacred, passionate, and an act of love for self and others. Outside the kitchen you can find her at the intersections of infertility, chronic illness, and a deep love for the dignity of all humans. She hopes to create a space that is holistic about the role of food in the social, political, relational, and physiological dynamics of our world.