Come on, ride the train, it's the choo choo train

I've only ever been on a train two times in my life, that I can remember anyway. Something tells me that trains in Europe are a whole other ball game however. What better way to make our way from city to city than by train? Sure its not necessarily the quickest way to get from point A to point B, and with a growing number of inter-European discount airlines, flights between many European cities have become very inexpensive, but there is no other way I would want to travel during our trip than by train. Its such a part of the quintessential "backpacking through Europe" experience. There are several different options when traveling by train. You can purchase point to point tickets which are best when only visiting a few cities, or you can purchase a rail pass. There are many different types of passes, individual country passes, regional passes, select passes (up to 5 countries connected by train/ferry), and global passes (21 countries). Most of these passes are available for both flexible or consecutive travel days and for varying lengths of time. Tim and I selected the 1 month consecutive global pass which will allow for unlimited travel within the 21 countries included on the global pass for one month. It was very exciting to receive our passes in the mail. With each purchase/booking I become more and more excited. I can't wait to be whizzing through the European countryside planning what we will do at our next exciting stop on our amazing European journey.

Away We'll Fly

It's amazing how quickly time goes by. With our Europe trip less than three months away, it was time to start working out the logistics, and the first thing on my list was to book the flights. Luckily we were fortunate enough to have additional frequent flyer miles, even after booking our flights to Australia this December, and were able to use these additional miles to book our Europe flights as well. As planned, we will leave the U.S. on our anniversary, the third of June. Our flight leaves Indianapolis at 7:50pm on Thursday, June 3rd, which means we will likely share an anniversary meal together at the Indianapolis airport as we wait to embark on our journey. We will have a two hour layover in Toronto before we jump over the pond, arriving in London at 11:25am on Friday, June 4th. We found it was easiest to book our reward flights going in/out of London/Paris, but as you recall, we are scheduled to start our trip in Istanbul, Turkey on Saturday, June 5th, so we will only be in London for the better part of the day, departing at 10:30pm Friday, June 4th for Cairo, Egypt where we will again have a few hours before boarding our final flight (by this time I am certain we will be ready to fall into a bed for a good night's sleep) at 10:45am on Saturday, June 5th. We will arrive at our final destination (or our first destination depending on how you look at it) at 1:00pm on Saturday, June 5th and will check into our hotel in Istanbul to get a good nights rest as we will hit the ground running the very next day.

The weeks that follow our arrival in Istanbul are sure to be amazing, exciting, exhausting, among many other things as we make our way from Istanbul, Turkey to Paris, France. After nearly two months of travel I am certain we will be sad to end our journey, but will be eager to return home to family, friends, and of course, our beloved puppy Milo. We will leave Paris at 7:20am on Tuesday, July 27th and will arrive back in Indianapolis (via Lisbon, Portugal and Newark, New Jersey) at 10:18pm that same evening.

It is nice to know how our journey will begin and end, but I cannot wait to see what we encounter along the way!

Another Opportunity Realized

We have such an exciting year ahead of us. First, we will pack our bags for a trip to Europe this summer. Then when we return we will be packing up our stuff again (although much of it is still in boxes in my brother's basement) and will make the one hour move south to Bloomington, Indiana where we will both be students next fall and where we will spend the next two years of our lives together. While the thought of both being students is a bit unnerving in the sense that we will have NO income and will be living ENTIRELY off student loans, it also presents us with some unique opportunities and having the time off before school to go to Europe this summer is just one of those opportunities.

For those that don't know, Tim moved to the U.S. with his family from Australia when he was three, leaving all of his extended family behind. I was fortunate enough to spend a semester abroad in Australia from January to July 2005 and had the pleasure of meeting nearly all of his extended family. Tim has been to Australia many times throughout the years, including two trips in college during winter breaks, and most recently he accompanied me for two weeks in January 2005. Neither of us have been since our visits in 2005 and have been waiting for the perfect opportunity to make it back for a visit. And with our both going back to school this fall, we have the perfect opportunity. Thankfully Tim had saved up a lot of frequent flyer miles and we were able to book flights using those miles to go to Australia this December over our winter break. We will leave Indianapolis on Thursday, December 23rd and will arrive in Sydney, Australia on Christmas morning, and we couldn't asked for a better Christmas present! We will be in Australia for about three weeks and have been invited to stay with Tim's cousin Debbie and her husband Tristan and their new baby Jasper. During our visit we hope to in addition to visiting with family in Sydney and frequenting its many beaches, take in New Years Eve at the Sydney Harbour, make a trip up to Byron Bay for a short holiday, and visit family in Brisbane.

We have a very exciting year ahead of us indeed!

Change creates Opportunities

One of the most exciting things about change is the opportunities it creates. Deciding to go back to school and pursue my MBA full time has created a myriad of opportunities for Tim and myself. One such opportunity and what will be a primary focus of this blog is TRAVEL. Ever since studying abroad in college I told myself that travel was one area in life that I would not let money stand in my way. Since Tim and I will be leaving our life in Indianapolis to move to Bloomington in the fall, there is a rare window of opportunity this summer to travel and see the world. Sure we don't exactly have the money to do it, but when else in our life will we have so little holding us back. For this reason Tim and I have decided that we are going to seize this opportunity and take two months this Summer to travel through Europe, and this blog will tell you about our journey.

Right now the plan is that I will work up through the end of May. Then on June 3rd, our four year anniversary, we will embark on our journey. How appropriate that we start our journey on our four year anniversary, the first three years of our marriage have took us through some trying times, I can't imagine a better way to put our yesterdays behind us than to embark on this spectacular journey together.

For the first part of our trip we will be traveling with Tim's mom, Sue, and her father, Les, better known to all as Grandad. We are grateful to them both for helping to make this part of our trip a reality and look forward to our travels with them. We will meet up with Sue and Grandad in Istanbul, Turkey where we will commence a 12 day guided tour that will take us through Turkey and the Greek Islands. Highlights include Troy, Gallipoli, Ephesus, Mykonos, Santorini, etc. For a complete itinerary see: Constantinople to Hellas Tour from Fez Travel. From there we will spend a couple of days at leisure exploring Athens on our own before departing on a 4 day guided tour that will take us to other mainland Greece highlights including Delphi, Olympia, and Meteora. For a complete itinerary for our 4 day tour of mainland Greece see: 4-day Classical Greece Tour from Viator. Our travels will end with Sue and Grandad on the morning of June 23rd when they will head back to the U.S. and Australia respectively and Tim and I will board a flight to start the second leg our trip.

Tim and my goal for this Europe trip is to see as much as possible in the time we have. We want to get a taste of as many different locations and cultures as we can, and leave Europe with a list of places we want to return to to get a more in depth experience down the road. With that being said our itinerary is tentative and will be constantly subject to change, but we have at least a general path plotted through Europe that will start in Budapest, Hungary and end in Paris, France. Along the way we plan to make stops in Austria, Switzerland, the French Alps, the French Riviera, Spain, Portugal, and the Loire Valley of France. Over the weeks to come I will share more with you about the different places we hope to see and things we hope to do along our journey. For now the next step is securing our airfare and rail passes, two tasks I hope to have completed before the weeks end. After that there will be no turning back!