Decisions, Decisions, Decisions...

More than once before we left for our trip, I had people I know ask, "Hey, Jen!  I see that you're taking a big family vacation.  How do you decide where you want to go and what you want to see?"  I've pondered that for awhile and just thought I'd share some of the resources that I have used.

A big family vacation is something that our family loves to take, but it isn't something we do every year.  We've set it up as an every 4 year vacation and that makes it nice as we can do some thorough research on places that are "in the running" for our next trip and save up money for it.  After visiting South Dakota in 2010, I will admit that we fell in love with the West, but Wyoming was NOT in the mix of places we were looking at for our vacation this year until my hubby was brutally honest with me.  "Jenny, I know that you'd really like to go south and explore Tennessee, but I'm really not all that interested in going there.  Would you consider somewhere else?"  Would I?  Sure I would, so we talked it over and he wanted to go West again, so we looked at some options and then selected Wyoming as our destination.

At the Northeast Visitors Center

Jake "riding horse" at the Visitors Center

The first place I always go to once we've picked our destination is the state's tourism department as they are a wealth of information!  I obtained the paper copy of their vacation guide along with the app of it for our iPad.  I still like getting the paper copy so that I can make notes and highlight things we might be interested in seeing as we're planning our trip.  I was able to request that Wyoming vacation guide right from their webpage at Wyoming Tourism.

Second, check your friends and colleagues.  Who has been to the state you're going to or even the venues you plan to take in?  I have been so lucky in this regard as my parents have been West numerous times and so have many of my colleagues and they're all eager to share places they loved and would definitely visit again.  They are usually pretty honest about places you could skip, too.  This all helps in planning out your itinerary.

Finally, check those travel websites such as TripAdvisor.  Many of the places we stopped on our vacation asked that we please leave a review on TripAdvisor so others could see what we liked about the venue.  I actually used quite a few reviews from this site to help plan our vacation.

There are many other places you can obtain travel information, but these are my top three.  What are some places that you would recommend?