h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As well as (attempts at) group planning, there were also a couple of people with whom I did 1-on-1 planning. I did quite a lot of private planning with Ag, mostly of the "Would it be practical to do this and this the same day?" variety, and soon formed an idiosyncratic map of London based on the fact that everything is 1 hour from her flat (it rather blew my mind when I found a thing (that I ended up not doing, due to time constraints) that was 45 minutes away instead of a full hour). Before that, though, I actually got to speak with Mol on the phone to figure out train routes and where I would be on which dates--before we talked, I knew when I'd be on that side of the ocean, flying into and out of Gatwick, and whom I'd be staying with, just not in which order. Once we figured out an actual itinerary, it was time to fill in details.

Detail-filling went fairly smoothly, for the most part. Except for one rather memorable weekend of planning, when I had it firmly in my head that I would be leaving London on a Monday, just as I'd be leaving the other Meet cities on the Monday after Meets, so I got rather panicked, thinking I'd have to decide between London things and going to Hever Castle, which I really wanted to do. After over a full day of playing with transit times and asking what would work, I thought to actually check my itinerary that I had posted here--and found that I was leaving London on Wednesday instead of Monday, so I had time to do London stuff *and* Hever. Since all this took place in the private FB group, noone else had to know how dumb I'd been! Oh, wait...

All this public planning may seem a bit much, but I needed to coordinate with other people, and, previously, I'd only really had to worry about maybe meeting 1 person for a day over a 2 week vacation. Planning time *was* helped quite a bit by planning being a great displacement activity--work was quite stressful for couple of months, and here was this big thing to research and plan