A good place to start

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The way I have experienced travel, or any other exciting event, thus far in my life is that much of the joy and the overall experience begins in the planning stages. I considered starting this blog next year when my husband and I embarked on our first trip to Europe, but because we will spend the next 10 months planning for it and only 2 weeks actually on the trip, I thought it would be both fun and valuable to begin the process now. To track this experience from the very first moment of "oh my god, we're actually doing this" seems a much more real and fullfiling way to think about it.

So, here we go. As of right now, we have our flights on hold with the airline and hope to make the big call tonight to say "Book it, Dano!" (or whoever our customer service rep might be :-). We are using miles to book the flights over and back, going first/business all the way. We have been saving these miles since 1999 for our "someday" trip.

Someday has finally come!

There has already been MUCH planning, talking, thinking, exploring that has gone into where we are now but I have a feeling we have only scratched the surface. Here is what we will be booking tonight:


• Leave SFO on Sept 15, 2012 on British Airways, First Class
• Arrive London Hethrow on Sept 16
• Depart Paris Oct 1 First/Business
• Arrive SFO Oct 1


Our plan is to then book two one-way flights from London to somewhere in Italy, likely either Florence or Rome and go from there. We'll spend X number of days in Italy and then at some point, make our way via rail or air to Paris where we will spend somewhere between 3-5 days including our 22nd wedding anniversary. And that's literally all we know for sure at this point. The journey to discovering what we want to do while there begins now. We don't want to choreograph the entire trip as we both love the ability to be spontanious and to change directions. But we do want to make the most of our time while there. We don't plan on this being our only trip to Europe, but we also believe that life is short and precious and unpredictable, so we do want to make sure we both get out of it what we really NEED to, just in case it IS the last time we'll see this part of the world. And so the journey begins. I'm looking forward to any and all input from people we know and from people we don't!

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