Taking Off #2: Questions (and Ultimately, Answers)

Map: thumbnail of our itinerary, so to speak, as of today. Click on it to see a larger, more zoomed-in  map which more clearly separates out the destination markers.

As more or less novice international travelers, The Missus and I have loads of questions both general and specific about traveling and short-term-staying in the British Isles and Europe. We know we don’t need answers to all of them before actually getting there, but we also don’t want to forget any questions which might ultimately be in the need-to-know category.

Everyone’s got their own ideas about how to make up a to-do list. This one seems to rather sprawl across categories, though: it probably requires geographic and calendar details, simple bulleted lists and whole paragraphs, lingering questions and firm answers…

After some thought, I’ve come up with a simple dumping-ground page which will function as my running scratch pad. (You can view it here. It’s password-protected, mostly to discourage random drop-ins from strangers and bots, but if you can figure out the acronym for this site then you’ve got the password.) The page’s contents will be flexible, morphing, growing, and shrinking over time, with links to more detailed discussions about some of the items to appear in later posts. So if you’re really into keeping tabs on the current status, that’s the place to bookmark instead of a whole list of individual ones.

A couple weeks ago, we attended a family celebration up in New Jersey, where we shared with various people the rough outline of this whole EuroTrip idea. A few of these folks, especially of the sibling-offspring variety, encouraged us to plan as little as possible — to just let things happen. While there’s a certain adventurous appeal to the thought, really: we’re not that adventurous. We know we don’t need to plan out every detail of every destination, we don’t need to buy tickets to everything in advance, and so on. We do know the pleasure of being caught by surprise. We can certainly let those things “just happen” on an ad-hoc basis. But we also like to have some certainties in hand — a skeleton, as it were, on which to hang all the individual surprises (and not incidentally, mitigate if not eliminate the unpleasant ones). That’s what the “Need-to-Know and Need-to-Decide Index” page will be for.