Day: 2 January 2018

Day 0 minus 50

 

With places and people we want to visit on our trip pretty much settled, it is time for us to consider at our modes of travel.

We loathe long haul flights! We have tried all sorts of flight combinations to make these long trips more bearable, but nothing has really worked. With that in mind we talk about traveling by ship for a good part of this journey. A few years earlier we traveled by ship from Auckland to Los Angeles and then returned home by a long flight. The trip home was so bad that it took away much of the joy we had experienced on the sea voyage.

 

So this time we think that we’ll look for a sea voyage home. We’ll fly Auckland to Singapore; have a brief stopover then fly onto Frankfurt.

We like to visit Europe after the main summer season but before the winter sets in, so we are thinking about leaving New Zealand in September.

Now most cruise lines head south to our part of the world early in the New Year, so their passengers are escaping the chills of winter and heading into the Southern summer.

We search and search for a cruise ship that would be heading ‘down-under’ in our late spring/early summer. We both search independently as we go about searching the net differently from each other. We seem to be looking for weeks and we are almost at the point of giving up, when I decide to try cargo ships. I put in tentative dates and quite by chance come across a cruise-line called Cruise and Maritime Voyages. They do an annual repositioning trip from Tilbury to Fremantle, Australia with a stop in Auckland! Eureka!

We book our trip home; then begin working backwards for the middle and beginning bits!

 

 

Day 0 minus 100

On a warm summer evening in the New Year, Gray asks me what I want for my birthday this year. “It’s a special one so we need to do something special to celebrate, don’t you think?”

I think for a moment, then say with a grin , “How about a trip around the world in 70 days, a day for each year!” I shouldn’t really joke when it comes to travel, as Gray needs no encouragement at all to be off and away.

So, it is decided. We begin to plan our Trip Around the World for 70 years. We decide that trying to fit into exactly 70 days may place too many constrictions on us. We begin planning what we really want to do.

The first view is, Europe. We love France, so it is obvious that we’d want to go there again. England is another obvious choice as Gray still has some family there. We wonder about Scandinavia as we have been enjoying watching some Danish TV series. And are intrigued to find out more. Maybe we could travel by train from Paris through Brussels up through Holland. The possibilities for a great trip are endless.

After many long, excited discussions I decide that I need a notebook to jot down all the possibilities for us to mull over. We use the net for most of our research as well as listening to friends about their recent trips.

Many mornings over breakfast Gray says, “Now, this is just an idea, not set in concrete, but have you thought…?” Sometimes I enthuse and rush for the notebook and other times I mutter that my notebook is looking pretty scruffy with all the cross outs. There are pages titled Final, final, final plans by the time we’d start any bookings.