One Week to Go

I’m putting my travel journal back on my bookshelf. For the past few years, I’ve faithfully journaled as we’ve traveled, but for this upcoming trip, I’m going to practice what I preach and create a blog. Last year, I had the opportunity to teach a class on how to research travel online. I encouraged the participants to use blogs and trip reports to learn about their destination, and I also encouraged them to create their own. So even though I've written reviews and short trip reports, this is my first attempt at an actual travel blog.

A Bit about Us

(If you know us or are bored easily, skip this part.) We are a couple in our 60’s, relatively active, and enjoy independent travel.  I love to research our trips, and my husband is flexible enough that he lets me do most of the planning.  We are not travelers who spend the majority of our time in museums; we much prefer to be outside hiking, exploring neighborhoods, and going to local markets.  We may be the only tourists who have visited Florence three times and never set foot in the Uffizi.  Instead, we spent hours sitting outside of it watching the human statues prepare for work.

Greg enjoys photography and we also spend a great deal of our travel time looking for photo opps.  I hope to post some of his photos in this blog.  I’ll also post some of mine that I’ll just take with my cell phone.  His will be memorable.  Mine will be of my lunch.  You’ll be able to tell the difference.  

How This Trip Mushroomed into What it is

Some neighbors went to London for 6 weeks, rented an apartment, and lived like locals. This sounded amazing to us until we started to price out apartments. Yikes! Way too expensive. So we reduced that time. Then friends indicated they wanted to meet us in Normandy. While researching Normandy, I kept reading about Brittany and the coastal walk, so we added that to the itinerary. And the only way to get home from Normandy is through Paris, so that was added. We’re now going to be gone for almost a month -

• London - 9 nights
• Portsmouth - 1 night
• Quimper (Brittany) - 4 nights
• Dinan (Brittany) - 4 nights
• Arromanches-les-Bains (Normandy) - 5 nights
• Paris - 5 nights

And we’ll be traveling by plane, ferry, train, rental car, lots of buses, the London Tube, and Paris Metro. All of our accommodations will be apartments or small houses, and we've reserved them through a variety of online sources (Homeaway, AirBnB, etc.).

That's all for now. Next time we post, we'll be in London!