My advice isn't much different from everybody else's, but, hey, I typed it, so I'll post it.

My thought about the restaurant in the distant city are:

- Create a "cities" folder, either physical or on your computer.
- Whenever you encounter something that you'd like to do if you're in a particular city, create a document (computer) or grab and write a header on a piece of paper (physical folder) for that city, and add the piece of information. Or, of course, add it to the file or paper you already created last time you had a picee of information to record about that city.
- Add "check cities folder" to your travel checklist. If you don't have a travel checklist, there are probably any number of other reasons for having one.

Similarly, you could creat a "gifts" folder, with either one document/paper with all of your ideas, or separate documents/papers for each of your likely friends, and maybe one more for "general gift ideas".

If you form a habit of checking your own reference material for specific occasions in your life - travel, giftgiving, party-throwing, holidays, etc - then you have a built-in way to remind yourself of these things.

Do I do this? No. But it seems like a good idea.