Oh, the Places We'll Go

When we first decided to do an around the world trip for a year we thought we could go everywhere we wanted in that amount of time.  We asked each of the kids for their input and told them we would try to work in a place they wanted to visit.   Their first choices were China, Egypt, Italy and  the Philippines.  We used those 4 locations as a starting point and started to fill in the rest of the itinerary from there.

We tried lots of options and quickly found out that we couldn't go everywhere.  It was hard to eliminate places, but we just couldn't fit them all in.   We worked on the itinerary for several weeks until we came on one that works for us.   And that is the key, it works for us.  Sure there are other places that we would love to visits, but for some reason it wasn't right for this trip.   That just leaves places for us to go on future adventures!

I spent many hours researching costs in the various countries and while we don't know all the expenses in each area, I am certain that we can make this all work.  We will try to balance out the costs by staying in more expensive countries for shorter periods of time, and less expensive countries for longer stays.

As we begin our trip we plan to  visit  California, Washington DC, Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, China, and Japan.

We have some flexibility in our itinerary.  We have purchased the major airfare in and out of a region, but have flexibility in between.  We plan to use buses, trains, and regional flights to travel around.  If we really like an area, we can stay a little longer, if somewhere isn't right for us, we can move along and find a new location.   Hopefully we have done the right amount of planning.  The idea was to plan enough that we knew where we were going, but not so much that we didn't have flexibility along the way.