Schnitzel with Noodles: Phase 1: Trip planning

I have wanderlust. So does my husband. It is kind of bad (in a good way). This year, since we are currently child-less and our Winter Break schedules meshed, we hopped several planes to Turkey for 10 days. Thanks to our awesome families for being relatively cool about us skipping Christmas 2012! It was an absolutely phenomenal trip - yes, bumps in the road at times, but those bumps just become the war stories you talk about for years anyway. It was the kind of fun when you know you're having it while it is happening. Not the kind when retrospectively, you're like 'oh yeah, that was pretty fun' but you didn't enjoy it as much as you should have in the moment - no way dude, it was a blast and we knew it!!

When we started planning the trip in June, we weren't sure where we'd go. Our bucket list is enormously overwhelming (a symptom of wanderlust). So, it came down to one multi-faceted question.

Question: Where can we go for the least amount of dough that won't shut down over the Christmas holidays (which would sorta defeat the purpose) and is still a desirable place to visit?

Answer: Turkey!

To plan this adventure, I used a few different sources.
1. I must say, TripIt.com was amazing. I love planning trips but all of the confirmations and other research can be cumbersome. This was the first trip I used the TripIt tool and it was so organized and streamlined.
2. I also heavily relied on tripadvisor.com. I wasn't sure where to go in Turkey in the wintertime, as it is a somewhat dead tourist season...thank you tripadvisor for helping me figure that out! As if its ears were burning, check out yesterday's Frugal Traveler blog post about tripadvisor.
3. Apparently, I'm not the only person who has questions relating to Turkey travel. There are so many of us out there that Tom wrote an extremely helpful blog devoted to all things Turkey!
4. Additionally, I always choose a trusty old school travel book. For this trip, I chose National Geographic's Istanbul & Western Turkey guide. I like the paper version to annotate, star things, and whip it out as the authority when we have a question 'in-country' (I'm that nerd).

In the end, this is what our TripIt map looked like.