Trip planning fails the same way everywhere: it starts with a search engine instead of a shape. Four hundred open tabs later you have logistics without a journey. The method our planners use on their own trips fits in an evening — and it starts with paper.

Spread a map of your region — actual paper, or at minimum a fullscreen map with every other window closed. Now find your three anchors: the three experiences you'd genuinely rearrange the trip for. Not ten. Three. A migration crossing, a trek between two huts, a festival on one fixed date. Circle them. Everything not yet circled is negotiable.

Draw lines between the anchors and apply the geography test: those lines should flow in one direction, never double back, and rarely exceed four hours of transit per move. If your route looks like a spider, an anchor is wrong. Kill an anchor — the itinerary survives, the spider doesn't.

Now allocate with 60-30-10. Sixty percent of days serve the anchors (the places you came for). Thirty percent serve discovery (the village between anchors, the detour a driver mentions). Ten percent stay deliberately empty — recovery mornings, weather days, the afternoon you fall in love with a harbor and refuse to leave. Unscheduled time isn't waste; it's where trips actually happen.

That's the whole method: three anchors, one-direction lines, 60-30-10. The evening you spend on paper will save the week you might have lost to spider routes. Or send us the map with your three circles — this is, quite literally, the same conversation our planning calls begin with.