Travel planning

I didn’t make my first international journey, heck, my first airplane ride, until I was well into my twenties. The opportunity to travel just wasn’t part of my upbringing, to this day I don’t think my mother has yet to leave the continent. It wasn’t until my best friend moved to the UK that I had a reason to go anywhere. Once I did though, I was hooked.

From that first short trip to the UK I followed it up with another, then a trip to Italy, then Cuba, Thailand, Mexico, Switzerland, Croatia, and going back to the warmer climes to indulge my new hobby of scuba diving. Much of this I documented online in one way or another.

Although I’ve been very lucky to travel to all these wonderful places, all my travel has been for 1, 2, 3 or at most 4 weeks at a time (the one 4 week trip worked by combining 2 weeks in one year, and 2 weeks in the next for my 30th birthday in January of 2008). As much as I have loved all these trips, they’ve only really served to whet my appetite for travel.

Which brings me to now. Now, after quite literally years of planning, I have the opportunity to take a year off of my day job and to spend the bulk of that time travelling. I am, understandably I hope, very excited.

Now I’m getting close to the trip, the counter on the right is counting down to my last day of work and the official start of my travels. As I hope to document my trip via this blog, I have decided to start now with the planning and pre-booking phase.

So to start in the middle rather than at the beginning the only thing I’ve actually booked is for October which is just about at the half-way mark of my intended trip. I will be trekking the Annapurna circuit in Nepal in October. I booked so far in advance because there was literally only one spot left and the dates worked for me.

Also, at this early point it’s really more about establishing a firm marker around which I can plan. I now know that I need to be in Nepal before October 20th, so I can shape my plans before then with that in mind. What those tentative plans are though, I’ll save for a future post.