Member-only story
A 1–2–3 Day Trip Plan for a successful family adventure
Create an effective plan for a day trip with your kids (with examples).
What is a 1–2–3 plan?
Setting out for the day with only a single destination in mind can work out fine, and it can also end with disaster. More than likely, it will end up somewhere in-between.
Before I started using this strategy, I would have to be pretty quick on my feet to come up with new options when our primary destination failed. Usually, I could work things out and recover our outing before it became a failure. Quite often though, I’d exhaust myself early on in the day while coming up with a new plan and managing what the kids were doing around me.
Eventually, I started creating my fallback plan ahead of my weekend day trips with my kids. I realized that if I added on a couple of convenient nearby alternatives to our day trip plans, a day out with my kids became more successful. I also could investigate ideas for other days out at the same time.
Here is the structure to a 1–2–3 Plan
- Primary Destination
- Fallback Option 1
- Fallback Option 2
If everything goes according to plan, the primary destination might be the only thing we will need, but if needed, we have the next two options on our list to choose from. When we need to go to either of the fallback…
