[Map: to label this an “itinerary” would be to mislead you. At best, it’s a pre-alpha version of an itinerary. (For reference, I cribbed this from Google Earth in August 2019, but I am counting on its persistence over the next year. We especially don’t want to see any of those countries under water by then.)]
Let’s see now… how to summarize what we’re up to…?Well, for starters, we’ve realized for years that we’re pathetically under-traveled, to coin a euphemism. Yes, we were married in Vancouver, on a cruise up the northwest coastline; yes, I’ve been to Israel and to Canada for a couple of visits, long before The Missus entered the picture; and yes, The Missus — I think? — has spent a tiny amount of time in Mexico, thanks to a long-ago habitation in El Paso, Texas. Between the two of us, during our lives we’ve at least visited many areas of the USA itself — but almost none of them as a couple.
And that’s pretty much it. See? Under-traveled.
In spring, 2018, we took a tentative step towards correcting that: we spent a week in England, splitting our time between a little town (Ludlow) in Shropshire and London itself. “A week,” I hear you well-traveled ones thinking; “A week?!?” Yes, it didn’t take us more than a couple days to realize the folly.
So here’s the current (very gray, shadowy) master plan for mid-2020:
- Post-retirement, visit the UK for two months.
- Visit northern Europe for two months.
- Visit southern Europe for two months.
To aid in pulling this off, we sold our house this past April and moved to an apartment with about half the floor space. (We have a metric sh!t-ton of stuff in storage — much of which we know I am confident we’ll probably never see again.) The sale and the move afforded us some genuine adventures in their own right, and maybe I’ll post more about it all later.
But for my purposes now, it’s important only to know that our lease expires in June, 2020, and that we have no plans to renew it. Between March (retirement) and June, we’ll prep for the real trip, and we’ll visit family… and then we’ll be gone for a while.
The planned sequencing of those three destinations is driven mostly by our understanding of likely climatic conditions: going to the UK in June-August should help us avoid the worst (i.e, coldest — The Missus hates cold weather!) temperatures and precipitation there; going to northern Europe in August-September should enable us to see at least some of that before anything like, um, articness sets in; and moving on to southern Europe in September-October should feel positively paradisaical after whatever we experienced elsewhere.(For the record, we’re both looking forward to visiting all those destinations, particularly the UK, but also the Continent. If we were only going to see northern OR southern Europe, though, we’d probably have to face some touchy negotiations: I’m more the northern-Europe sort, and she’s more the southern-. In more general geographic terms, I’m mountains and she’s beaches.)
So that is Stage 1 as we see it.
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