In the spirit of pull over push, we decided to share our adventure using a blog rather than blow up everyone’s Facebook several times a week with a bunch of “look at me. look at meeee!” photos. We will still post occasional photos on Facebook to broadly capture our meandering about Europe, but this blog will provide much greater detail.
This blog has multiple audiences. In no particular order:
- close family and friends who are interested in regular updates on our travel experiences
- fellow travel enthusiasts looking for details on our activities, lodging, food, and travel experiences
- ourselves so we have a recorded document to remind us how we spent our 125 days in Europe
This trip began on September 13th, 2022 when we flew from Baltimore Washington International (BWI). We plan to return to the United States in mid-January 2023, at which point we will start getting serious about finding new careers somewhere in Wisconsin.
For the near-term, we intend to update this blog at least weekly and will organize it by country or city most recently visited.
We conceived taking this trip nearly a year ago. The biggest obstacle was figuring out a solution for pet care while we traveled. Thanks to the generosity of friends, our cat is currently living in Wilmington, Delaware and our dog is living in the middle of Arkansas. Once we solved the pet problem, everything else was easy. We also have three kids but one is out of college and two are in college; piece of cake as long as they don’t fail out this semester.
We decided the most cost effective way to travel would be to free ourselves from the shackles of a mortgage, utility bills, and lawn care. We sold our house in Virginia Beach in mid-August, dropped our youngest at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spent two weeks with our parents in Wisconsin, attended a class reunion in Annapolis, Maryland and then caught a plane for Europe.
Lyn and I have never traveled for any extended period before and we have not done it without kids in nearly 25 years. Our last trip where it was just the two of us was to Ireland in the Spring of 1998, less than a year before the first baby. Thanks to the Navy, Lyn came to meet me in St. Martin (Fall 1996), Livorno, Italy (Spring 1997), St Croix (1999), Lisbon (2002), and Dubai (2012). All of those visits were less than a week in length and only Dubai was longer than four days. So this adventure is something new for us.
We are on a budget. Our our cash flow is very dynamic with the transition from being an active duty Navy family to a retired Navy family. We have planned and saved enough to enjoy the next 125 days without starving to death or going into debt, but we also neither can afford nor desire to approach each day or event with the spending habits of a drunken Sailor on his last night ashore (been there, done that). I share this only to emphasize for fellow travel enthusiasts that money IS an object in our planning calculus; we will do our best to be thrifty where it makes sense and to spend money on once-in-a-lifetime opportunities where it also makes sense.
Finally, we both have some professional goals during the next four months and will be looking for opportunities to get some downtime and prioritize preparing for what comes after this trip (i.e. getting a job in a new place). Hopefully, this won’t be at the expense of our adventurous spirit, but we want to approach some aspects of this trip as “living in Europe” rather than “being non-stop tourists in Europe”. This will especially be the case during our extended stay in Pontevedra, Spain and our month in Croatia where the weather and low tourist season will likely help us moderate our activities, cook our own meals, and spend some time focusing on professional certifications.
This is probably too much already for an introduction, but we wanted to provide some context. And the beauty of a blog is that if you are still reading this, then it’s your own fault and not ours.
Below this paragraph is “the plan” as we envisioned it on the day of departure. Like any good plan, it is subject to change based on a variety of factors. One major constraint in our planning is the 90-day tourist visa limit for visiting the European Union’s “Schengen Zone”. Effectively, we can’t be in the EU for more than 90 days within a 180 day window of our first arrival, which was September 14th. In order to take a 125 day trip to Europe, then, we had to find somewhere outside the Schengen Zone to spend 25 days. Our top options were the UK (thank you, Brexit?), Croatia (an EU member but not a Schengen Zone member), or Morocco (basically same status as the UK). We ultimately decided on Croatia for its relative proximity in southern Europe, the low cost of living in the tourist off-season, and generally positive travel reviews). After the holidays, we may tack on a week or two in the UK but that is still very much TBD.
SEP
14-17 Iceland
17-23 Austria walking tour (6 days – Hopfgarten to St. Johann; up the mountain, down the mountain, up the mountain, up the mountain, down the mountain, and so on)
24-25 Modena, IT (meet up with USNA friend and spouse)
26-30 Aix-en-Provence (meet up with Navy friends)
OCT
1-2 Figueres, SP (Salvador Dali museum)
3-6 Andalusia, SP (get retiree ID card at U.S. military base after officially retiring on 30 SEP; need this to keep family health insurance active)
7-14 Barcelona (meet up with high school friends from Wisconsin and Switzerland)
15-18 Valencia (meet up with parents of Natalie’s Spanish exchange student friend)
19- 14 NOV Pontevedra, Galicia, SP
NOV
15-16 Porto, Portugal
17-19 DEC Crotia (Zagreb, Rovinj, Split)
DEC
20-03 JAN Malaga
03-TBD TBD
If you are still reading, thanks for sticking with it. Lyn and I welcome any feedback on content or tone of this blog. Our goal is to share the adventure, pass along what we learn, offer insights on the state of the global community, and hopefully inspire others to travel somewhere new. If you perceive that our tone or content is preachy, ignorant, condescending, or just plain wrong then we have failed and we’d please ask you to let us know. Hope you enjoy this blog and meandering with us in spirit.
