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!

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!