Month: January 2018

Day 0 minus 1

And Good to Go!

Our sea voyage home is booked. We are now planning the trip to Europe. Roughly calculating how much time we want to visit the various places on our list we settle for September 18^th to fly to Singapore. “That’s odd” I announce one morning when I was checking out flights and hotels for Singapore, “everything is booked for 18^th, 19^th and 20^th and it is six months away.” Our travel dates clash with the Formula 1.

So we book our flight to Singapore for September 14^th and begin booking for hotels or Airbnb that I have already checked out and noted in the holiday notebook.

Just when we are sure that everything is set, we hear from Gray’s brother that he and his wife have moved to Umbria, Italy. We really cannot spend time in Europe without visiting them, can we? Italy hadn’t been on our itinerary this time.

Once more back to the drawing board, or more accurately the little notebook. We really have to think long and hard about how we are going to fit everything in. We cannot lengthen our stay as we have a ship to board and we cannot leave home any earlier, either. It is tricky, but eventually we manage to slot everything in.

Planning the packing is another challenge. There will be seasonal changes. We anticipate that Italy and the south of France will still be quite warm, but Edinburgh in October is bound to be cold. But these seasonal changes are only part of the ‘what to pack’ dilemma. Mostly we will need casual clothes for hopping on and off trains, but on the ship coming home there’ll be formal nights requiring suits , jackets and evening dresses. And we really don’t want to be lugging huge suitcases around Europe. Problem solved. We’ll buy new clothes in London and store our 2 large suitcases in London whilst we train up to Scotland to visit friends.

There are no luggage restrictions on a ship, so we’ll collect our cases on the way back from Scotland and head for Tilbury.

It’s all in the planning!!

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.