Europe

Taking Off #9: Status (Updated Again), January 2020

January 18, 2020 by John 2 Comments

[As before, if you want to see a larger and more legible version of the chart, you can either (1) maximize your browser window, and then click on the version above; or (2) view a PDF version of it. Note that the latter is about 2.8 MB in size.]

Definitely a minor update today… If you’ve been following the excruciating intellectual saga to this point, you may remember that last weekend I posted an updated list of European cities we’re hoping to visit this year. That version of the list included a crucial refinement — it took into consideration:

Each country’s membership in the Schengen club; and
Our desire to be in the UK and Ireland both at the start of the trip, and during the month of August.

This brought us a little closer to something like a real itinerary, because it shows how we’d propose to jump into and out of the Schengen region during the allowed 180-day period, without overstaying the total of 90 days allowed in that window of time. The graphic depiction of this schedule included translucent indications of four distinct “calendar blocks,” as I think of them:

A month-long stay in England only;
A month-long stay in some of the mid- and the northern Schengen area;
A two-month stay in the rest of the UK and Ireland (plus a visit to non-Schengen Bucharest at the end of that block); and
A two-month stay in the remaining Schengen area.

(A fifth sorta-kinda vague block dangled at the end, in December; I assumed this to be up to a month back in the UK.)

It took me a few days to realize what bugged me about last weekend’s version of the schedule. To wit: the margins of the four main calendar blocks were sharply delineated, suggesting that we had some precise idea when each block began and ended. Which is rubbish; we don’t really know yet when even the first block starts, nor when the last one ends — let alone where and when we’ll be cavorting around in the middle. All we know for sure is that we must be out of our apartment by the end of May.

So, then, the very minor update: I’ve replaced those translucent-green blocks with translucent-green-gradient blocks: the blocks now sort of taper off from one to the other, with a bit of overlap to indicate the vagueness of the milestones.

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Taking Off #8b: Status (Updated), January 2020

January 12, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I posted (rather at length, I’m afraid) about some of the thoughts and activities recently percolating below the public surface of our plan to spend six-ish months in Europe, starting at the end of May. That post ended with a gloomy grumble about how complex the schedule was shaping up to be, based on several overlapping-not-quite-concurrent six-month timelines.

Well, I’ve thought some more about it all (as one tends to do). And this morning I did a little work to revise the complete bucket list of European cities in light of the nutty schedule I’d focused on yesterday. Here’s what the current thing looks like:

(For a larger view, expand your browser window and click on the image — or you can also view/download a PDF of the whole thing here.)

One particular thing to notice here, with those four calendar blocks highlighted in pale green: our original goal of needing to dress (and pack!) for only one climate — a sort of early-spring/late-fall climate — is more or less (to my great surprise) preserved.

Another thing to notice: the December block of time (marked “London?”) is unaccounted for. I know that if we start the Schengen clock ticking on July 1, as depicted above, we’ve got to be out of the Schengen area by the end of December. So in theory we could extend our southern-Schengen visit shown above by a couple weeks, in order to spend Christmas (and maybe New Year’s?) back in London.

I still have no idea how actually doable this all is, of course. So, more to think about as we go along.

Still…

Taking Off #1: Some Background

August 13, 2019 by John Leave a Comment

Map: our tentative 'itinerary' (laughing) for next year

[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.