PLANNING THE ADVENTURE OF A LIFETIME

The Adventure Begins!

The Adventure of a Lifetime begins in 2018. We have been re-imagining what Retirement might look like and we decided we want to un-tether from life as we’ve known it and travel the world. When we first were dating, we discovered we each aspired to travel (a lot) more. At the time, Barb’s idea of a romantic dream trip was to backpack through Europe with a rail pass like a college student while the Great Wall of China, St. Petersburg, and Scandinavia got Jon’s heart racing. Our dreams have grown and only become larger.

As we talked about where we would like to go and what we’d like to do, we quickly realized we want to go everywhere and see and do everything. This vision made us realize the vacation time we had while working would never be enough. We decided to take a year off work and travel the world. We had read a lot about millennials and young nomads taking a year before life tethered them down to explore our world. Hmmm, why not us? We’ve already been tethered our whole lives to family, kids, jobs, houses, and all of the other things we’re supposed to do. We started thinking what if we re-imagined everything we had learned and lived and built our life around a dream. The result is 2018!

Planning Assumptions

There were only a few planning assumptions we decided to work with. Starting with a blank piece of paper we realized that we would like to:

• Minimize flying (Not big fans of flying)
• Live like locals
• See the world
• Go past our comfort limits
• Create experiences and memories that would take our breaths away.

As we get close to beginning, we both regularly stop and remark we can’t believe we actually get to do this.

The Thought Process

No Limits

With no limits other than our imaginations, we started listing all of the places we wanted to go. This quickly turned into everywhere. So we needed to prioritize our ideas. We both are drawn to Europe. In 2011 we took a 14-day Mediterranean cruise with lots of stops in Italy, Croatia, Spain and France. This served as a sampler platter giving us a taste of places we knew we wanted to go back to. So we picked Italy as one of our initial key destinations.

Romance

When we think of romance and Europe like many people, Paris came to mind. Riding the chunnel was a bucket list goal so in addition to Paris this brought London into focus. We also discovered an imposed limitation of only being allowed to visit the Schengen area of the European Union (EU) for 90 days out of every 180 days. London was outside the Schengen area so this killed two birds so to speak. Jon really wanted to see the Baltics, and Croatia has been highly recommended by a lot of nomadic traveler blogs we’ve read.

Craving Something More

These ideas ticked off a lot of boxes on our list, but we still craved something more. We’ve never traveled longer than an 18-day vacation. So we aren’t sure if we’ll like it or how being un-tethered will feel, but we’re all in. Limiting thinking started creeping in, what if we only have 2018? Then we should go BIG. Thinking outside of Europe, China and Asia were also on our radar, but the 15-hour flight was not for us so we starting looking at cruises. Wrapping up 2018 we wanted to be ‘home’ for Christmas to be with family. Then we will look at and decide if we keep traveling in 2019, or if we want to return to reality and ‘normal’ life. Spoiler-alert: We pretty sure we’ll keep traveling, but recognizing we control and get to decide provides a little safety-blanket so we don’t feel TO un-tethered.

The Actual Plan

Given the hundreds of hours of dreaming, thinking and planning, we started cementing in some of the major elements of our itinerary. It looks something like this:

Italy

It might be the sampler platter Med Cruise in 2011, or influence from a number of movies, Eat Pray Love, Under the Tuscan Sun, Roman Holiday, Three Coins in the Fountain, The Tourist or any number of James Bond films (big James Bonds fans here). Whatever it was, we decided to kick off our big adventure with two months in Italy.

We’ve rented an apartment for March in Rome only 300 meters from the Colosseum. Image stepping out your front door and the Colosseum is right there. It is also in the ideal neighborhood of Rioni Monte. Rioni is 14th century meaning district and Monti literally means mountain. Rioni Monte is home of four of Rome’s hills. We hear that you are considered to be lucky to get lost on the side streets of Monti with the feel of a 1950’s movie set (Roman Holiday). We’re ready to be lost.

After Rome we plan to spend about four weeks visiting Sorrento and the Amalfi Coast, the hill towns of Umbria and Tuscany, Florence and the Cinque Terra spending about a week in each. To avoid flying we’ll travel by train to our next stop.

Paris

Ahhh – A week in Paris. We already know we’ll want to stay longer and have to come back (maybe in 2019). But we are budgeting our time allowed in the Schengen area. A week in Paris should be a nice appetite teaser to get us started.

We are actively working on putting together a 7-day plan to see the main sights while balancing this with some slower time to get a feel of what it would be like to be a local. Although we suspect when we arrive we will be like kids running through the gates of Disneyland wanting to see and do everything. Paris also queues us up for a train ride through the chunnel (bucket list item).

United Kingdom

We arrive in London by train from Paris. Wanting to really have time to experience London as the world class city it is, we’ve rented an apartment a few hundred feet from the Tower Bridge for a month. The balcony has views of the Thames, Tower Bridge and the Shard. This will also have us poised in walking distance to many of the major sights. After locking our plans in, an added bonus was the announcement of the Royal wedding during our stay. We keep checking the mail, but our invitation from the Queen hasn’t arrived yet. After four weeks in London we will venture initially to Bath.

As of this writing we are still locking down specific travel plans in the UK. Generally they include a week in Ireland, a few days in Conwy to visit some friends, Liverpool for Beatles mania, a week in Edinburgh, and a week in Scotland and the lake area.

Scandinavian Cruise

With so many countries and places to visit around the Baltics we opted for a 24-night cruise starting in Copenhagen. We have a couple of days in Copenhagen before we board the ship. This will give us time to explore. The cruise will visit Tallinn Estonia, a couple of days in St. Petersburg Russia, Helsinki Finland, Stockholm Sweden, Berlin Germany, Bergen and Alesund Norway.

From there we head north, way north, to Iceland. There are four ports of call in Iceland capped off by 2 days in Reykjavik. We wrap the cruise up visiting Torshavn Denmark and the Shetland Islands of Scotland returning to Copenhagen. Needing to exit the Schengen area again so we don’t overstay our welcome, it is off to destination points outside the Schengen.

Croatia – Sandwich Time

We have about four weeks between the end of the Scandinavian Cruise and the beginning of the next hard date on our journey. So we’ve penciled in this piece of our journey, but we’ll plan it from the road. While we need to be outside the Schengen area, this leaves us a lot of flexibility.

A couple of specific destinations we are planning on are Split and Zagreb Croatia spending possibly a week in each. Beyond that, we are toying with other options in the region including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Albania.

Grand Voyage

With our thoughts, dreams and compass points drawn to the Far East, we searched for a way to get there without flying. We found a grand voyage knowing this would truly make this an adventure of a lifetime – we immediately booked our PassageForTwo.

The locales, experiences, and memories of this type of a journey fit our dream of an adventure of a lifetime. We’ll set sail from Athens Greece aboard the newly christened Viking Orion.

This 64-day adventure will have many multi-day and overnight visits to stunning cities. Sailing from the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal we’ll visit Egypt, Jordan and India before charting a course eastward. After stops in India, Malaysia, and Singapore, we’ll make way for Southeast Asia. Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam will serve as our gateway to China.

After visits and overnight stops in Haikou, Hong Kong and Xiamen, we visit Japan. The more than 2 month cruise wraps up with Shanghai and Qingdao ending with a multi-day stop in Beijing,

China

We’ve sailed and found ourselves in the Far East mysterious orient. After exploring Beijing and Forbidden City we located a 14-day combination ground and river cruise through the interior of China. Overnight stops in Xian for the Terra Cotta Warriors and learning about the 3,100 year old Tang Dynasty. From there we’ll visit Chongqing, Shibaozahi before boarding our river ship and heading to Three Gorges. After a stop in Wuhan we head to Shanghai for a number of days to explore China’s largest city with over 5,000 years of history.

Slow Boat from China

From Shanghai we plan to catch a bullet train to Hong Kong for the final leg of our adventure of a lifetime. In Hong Kong we catch a slow boat from China homeward bound. Our 48-day cruise heads south making stops to visit Indonesia and Bali before arriving at continent number five on our adventure, Australia. We’ll spend more than a week in key cities in Australia while we’re down under. Our slow boat we make its way through a number of island stops in French Polynesia. After crossing the International Date Line and equator we’ll arrive for short stops in Hawaii where we hope to connect with family that live the Hawaiian dream. And then it is across the Pacific to our port of call in Los Angeles and a short hop up to Northern California back home.

Home for the Holidays

We will arrive home after more than 10 months circling the globe just in time to relax with kids and grandkids for the Christmas Holidays.

 

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