(Archived) Evernote makes euro travel so much easier!

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My wife (with an 8 & 11 y.o boys in tow) was traveling to London, Brussels and Paris. It was very last minute so we didn't have everything lined up except for the main flights, hotels in London, train to Brussel and flight back to London. No hotel reservation in Brussel/Paris and no train booking between those two cities yet. She had no itinerary for Brussel and Paris. She and the boys took along several Android devices (phones and tablet). The boys did a day of research at home on London so they had some ideas on where they wanted to go and made the underground map.

 

After they left and while I stayed behind (couldn't leave work), I did more research and made more train and hotel reservations. I upgraded to Evernote Premium for the offline feature and created a travel notebook with notes for itinerary, places to visit, bookings, etc.

 

In London, she bought a prepaid SIM and got 1GB data allowance but data roaming in Europe was expensive and therefore limited. Whenever she had wifi, she would sync up the notes on her Android phone and get the information, all well-organized and easy to read.

 

The notes include various details on new hotel bookings I made, places to visit, deals on local fares & passes.  I was able to add things like snapshots of maps with annotated routes (edited using Photoscape), bar codes for the Thalys fast train from Brussel to Paris, links to Web sites, etc. I created a day-in-Paris itinerary with consecutive metro stops for the various attractions, detailed with Paris Visite pass deal, etc. Items could get color coded to coincide with the color of the train lines. I could provide timetable of trains and buses for her to choose.

 

And this worked both ways: she took snapshots notes and I could see the pics and map where they had been (if the GPS info was available).

 

(Another plus - being on Android, I could log in to Play Store on my laptop and was able to push some additionals apps to her phone such as Thalys mobile ticket and Paris Metro 01 interactive map. She would wake up and find the app installed on her phone).