Back in March it was four months since I had posted anything, and I said I'd post again soon. Apparently almost three months is soon! Anyway, I can now say that we're going on holiday next month :-)
The plans we're planning to make - huh? - are pretty much all planned. The last big holiday back in 2012 was mostly a series of coach tours and cruises following pretty much on top of each other - so although I had to do a lot of planning to make them all hang together and to get us from one to the other, a lot of the time we just had to go where the coach or ship took us.
This time though the majority of our time is going to be spent going where we want to.
There's good and bad in that - on an organised tour you get a lot of information that you wouldn't necessarily get just by going to a place yourself. On the other hand, travelling by yourself, you aren't going to get dumped at a Horse Farm in Kentucky for 3 hours - for example! - when you don't really like horses all that much :-)
Anyway, the basics of the holiday haven't changed all that much.
We're flying with Qantas - as I said a couple of posts down, the price was too good to miss. And this time if there are no free seats in the terminal for the break in Dubai I won't care, because we will be in the Qantas Club (well, the Emirates equivalent anyway!)
We'll be arriving at Heathrow and from there we're hopping a bus to Bournemouth. We'll spend a few days doing some sightseeing - and recovering from the looonnnggg flight - before going to Southampton for an overnight stay. Then, we hop on the Celebrity Eclipse for a 2 week Baltic Cruise. Apologies in advance if you try that link and it doesn't work - cruise lines don't believe in wasting their money on functional websites!
Once we get back to Southampton at the end of the cruise, we're going to hire a car and see Portsmouth, Hastings, and Dover and then catch a train (two actually) to Newcastle Upon Tyne.
After that, the idea was to gradually travel south-ish, finishing in London. And, we weren't planning to make any more specific plans until we get there.
We're still finishing up in London (hopefully this time without a broken bone in my ankle!!) but the trip south isn't going to be so gradual. After I had already booked the hotel in Newcastle we found out that there's a gaming weekend that Paul wants to take part in. And it's in Stafford, which is more than half-way back to London.
But, it's all good - we're going to drive from Newcastle to Stafford where Paul will spend the weekend gaming. After that, we'll make decisions about where to go, and when, 'on the fly'. We certainly wanted to go to Liverpool, including a day trip to Dublin that Paul is quite keen on, but we'll have to see how we go.
I'm not quite sure how well this is all going to work. Most couples I've ever spoken to on the topic of holiday planning have one person who plans because they like to, and another one who goes along for the ride. In our house, I'm the planner. And, I'm the first to admit I get a bit obsessive about it. For example, I currently have three separate documents with information about the holiday (this is down from the four I had originally)! The main document is currently version 0.12 and 55 pages long, And, to my business friends - please note that it's still not final because the requirements aren't complete :-)
Plus, I've got 6 separate folders of paperwork, carefully sorted out into the different phases of the holiday for ease of finding them.
Now, you're either horrified or just nodding along with me at this point :-)
The thing is though, once we reach the end of the planned / prebooked / prepaid travel, then we have to make sure we end up with somewhere to sleep each night, and preferably, somewhere that we actually want to be! We've never tried this sort of travel before outside of Australia, and I know that even just to book a hotel I usually contemplate options on and off for a number of hours, often spread over a week or a month or more, before I actually make a booking. That's not going to work with this sort of travel.
A bit of uncertainty is probably good for me though, and I guess the worst thing that can happen is that we pay more than we wanted for accommodation or end up staying somewhere we didn't quite want to be.
Hopefully by the time we get there I'll have completely convinced myself of that :-)
