In the last post, I promised to share a bit about the resources we found most useful in planning this long-awaited trip to Thailand.

When we first set our sights on a destination–and this might be a year or two out–we buy a few guidebooks. Lonely Planet is a favorite, and the DK books are great detailed reference material for the cultural sights. For this trip we ended up with five or six books over our months of research.

For flights, Kayak is our go to search engine, but we always book directly through the airline.

We cull hotel recs from many sources, including the books, and cross reference Trip Advisor.

But beyond the basics, as we start putting together an itinerary, we use a combination of travel websites, blogs, travel TV shows, and YouTube.

Really, travel vloggers are becoming a great resource, and no more so than for this trip. The vloggers we found most helpful, each providing endless hours of information and inspiration, were Kara and Nate, Samuel and Audrey, and the incomparable Mark Wiens, who we discovered when we did our India planning in 2013.

And so, in a mere 24 hours, we will be putting all that planning to the test…