also look into Hugin
http://hugin.sourceforge.net/its a very powerful panorama stitching suite. Just lock the focus, exposure and white ballance (not strictly needed but makes it easier), take as many shots as you need to cover your desired image and stitch them together later. I have also used it for lining shots up for HDR without a tripod.
With my Pentax kit lens it works best if you use about 35mm, minimum distortion and vignetting that way and just take a couple more shots to get the extra angle of view. It is likely that your lens sweet spot will be in about the same place but my advice would be to play around and see what works best before you get to the trip of a lifetime.
If there are things close in which you want in the final image, its best to rotate around the nodal point of the lens. There are two ways of doing this
1: buy a highly expensive and hard to get panoramic tripod head. This is better but involves expense and lugging a tripod about.
2: stick your thumb underneath where the aperture ring would be if the lens had one, try to keep that thumb still and rotate around it. This is less accurate but will produce low enough parallax errors that it will come out in the wash about 9/10 times (with practice). This is how I always do mine.