books we read to plan the trip

Following are books that helped us plan our trip, from the big picture to the tiniest details. When planning a trip this big, it is overwhelming to walk into your local mega bookstore and check out the travel bookshelves. You could spend a fortune on books, and spend the next year reading them. Maybe this will give you a starting point.

Around the World Books
	Unforgettable Places to See Before You Die by Steve Davey Our copy is full of sticky notes. The pictures are stunning, we would love to see them all some day.
	Take Your Kids to Europe by Cynthia W. Harriman On our copy, you'll find highlighted sections on almost every page. The book is no longer intact since we are taking so many of the pages with us for the trip, torn out of the binding and attached to specific city/country files.
	A Rough Guide Special, First-Time Around the World by Doug Lansky This book is geared more to the single backpacker, but it has some helpful packing tips and general information.
	One Year Off by David Elliot Cohen Meredith loved reading of this family's exploits as they took a year off and traveled with their kids. It was inspiriting and sobering, it was one of the first books she read when we decided to take this trip and she has re-read it since.
	Exotic Travel Destinations for Families by Jennifer and Bill Nichols We are visiting some of the same places the families in this book visited, the information at the end of each chapter is very helpful for making reservations or researching further.
Country and Regional Guides
Rick Steves	We loved our Rick Steves books and used them regularly when planning the European portion of the trip. One of our favorites was Rick Steves' Europe Through the Back Door 2007, since it gave small bits of information on the whole of Europe, with suggested itineraries and candid commentary we found very useful.
Eyewitness Travel Guides	These are great guide books. We liked the full color pictures, and often paired it with a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide to compare notes. We used these for several different countries, including Australia (Eyewitness Travel Guides) and Europe (Eyewitness Travel Guides). We liked the more general Europe title since it compiled a large amount of information for many different countries, and we didn't have to buy individual country guides.
Lonely Planet	These guides are packed with all the usual travel guide info. We especially liked Lonely Planet Singapore and Lonely Planet Africa on a Shoestring.

websites we used to plan the trip

This trip would have been much harder to plan if not for the internet. We've listed sites that we visited multiple times. We used countless other web sites as we planned.

www.tripadvisor.com	Before we booked a hotel, we checked it out on trip advisor. We didn't always go with the consensus recommendation on trip advisor, but reviews from real travelers can help get the real story.
www.travelforkids.com	This site has great information. We used it to get find books to read to the kids to prepare them for a location, and also to get ideas for what to do in particular cities. They look at everything with kids in mind.
www.rfleming.net	This family took a trip around the world several years ago. We got a lot of information from this site, including ideas for what to include on our own web site. We got some good pointers on where to go and what to see.
www.sixintheworld.com	This is another family that traveled around the world. It was fun to trace their travels and imagine what our journey will be like.
To find sites, we would often go to google and enter something like "travel with kids Vietnam", and would invariably find all sorts of good information.

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