Planning

It really hasn't been that long, in the grand scheme of things. But we still feel out of practice.

The last couple of vacations that DW and I have taken have been pretty simple: we've booked all-inclusive resorts where all we had to do was show up. We stayed in the same place and pretty much did the same thing every day. We'd eat. We'd swim. We'd snorkel. We'd lounge. We'd eat some more.

It may sound boring but it's exactly what we needed. We needed to get away from the house, where we lived and worked, and just forget the stress of the pandemic. That isn't to say we weren't cautious about being near people and not wearing masks when indoors, but we needed to not feel trapped, not feel stuck in limbo.

We felt that we were living again.

Our last time in Europe: Nice, 2014.

But it's been a while since we've taken a trip that required significant planning. The last time that we did that was when we had planned for our trip to Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, in 2020. We had booked our airfare, reserved several accommodations, and had planned for rail travel.

We were even going to purchase bikes and cycle from Amsterdam to Bruges, and along the Moselle River, from Koblenz to Trier. When we were done with our rides, we would either sell the bikes or give them away (we had calculated that buying a used bicycle was cheaper than renting for a couple of weeks).

But then the pandemic hit and our plans were postponed indefinitely.

It's only been just over two years since we made those plans but it seems like longer. And now that DW and I are ready to travel to Europe again, we needed to make a checklist of things that needed to get done. It's like for the past two years, our brains have been in a fog and we need to start from scratch.

But we're getting there: flights have been booked. Accommodation has been taken care of. We've researched renting a car versus rail passes and will be purchasing the latter in the next month or so, as we get closer to our departure dates.

We've spent the past month going through myriad YouTube videos of all the places we plan to visit. I've made notes of essential things to do. Because I plan to bring my video cameras and make my own travel vlogs for YouTube, I've started planning shots, locations, and the best time of day to capture images.

Planning is almost complete. There are just a couple of minor day trips and activities that we need to organize. But these are minor and need no reservations.

I can't wait to travel again. Not just going to an all-inclusive resort (oh, we've already made our reservations to do that, again, next January) but a vacation of exploration, to go somewhere to which DW and I have never been.

All we have to do is wait for September to come.