Buying international travel tickets is costly and, therefore, horribly scary & stressful! (at least for me!) Right now I'm burying my head on the sand, ostrich-style, not thinking about all that debt on my credit card that we'll have to figure out how to pay! The problem is that we still have some debt from buying the car this summer, yikes! Is there such a thing as "good" debt? If yes, these qualify, I think! ;-)
We don't travel until mid-July next year, but bought the tickets two nights ago because tickets need to be purchased well in advance for these kinds of trips. Especially for such a crazy itinerary as ours! We fly into Cairo (via Frankfurt), tour through Cairo, Sinai Peninsula, Jordan and Israel with a group; fly from Tel-Aviv to Zurich, spend 14 days in Europe; fly back to the U.S.
I'm excited! The Middle-East trip will be with family: parents-in-laws, my parents, one of the brothers-in-law ("K2") and his wife & sons, my mother-in-law's sister and at least two of her three sons and their wives, maybe a few more relatives, and, to complete the group, some close and not-so-close friends. My sons will be baptized by their grandfathers (both pastors) in the Jordan River -- Kelvin's bright idea! -- and I think that's going to be very emotional and meaningful (my nephews may be baptized too, but I don't know).
Then our family and my parents and I will spend some time in Europe together. We haven't decided the itinerary yet, but I'm already super panicky that 14 days is ABSOLUTELY nothing & too little time! Good thing I spent 27 wonderfully packed days in Europe in 2000 backpacking, camping, and "Eurail-passing" with my husband, so we did see LOTS, most everything (museums, churches, monuments, sights) in these eight cities: Paris, Barcelona, Florence, Rome, Venice, Munich, Berlin, & Amsterdam.
The boys have an agenda, and it has ONE (cute!) item: they want to visit the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany, which is the largest model railway display in the world! So we have no choice, we have to go to Hamburg! ;-) And it's kind of "out of the way," but we'll do it for them (they also want to do the "behind the scenes" tour -- but we have to book one in English in advance, I don't know if that will work, but coming from so far away, it may be worth it!). K was saying we should then go to Denmark, but I think that maybe not, only if we had more time. My parents already know Denmark. They know most of Europe, actually, since they lived there for 3 years(1969-1972) and traveled around for 4 months at the end of their time there.
I don't really have any "agenda" except to visit my birth-place (Geneva) with my parents and to go to the Alps (wherever Rick Steves, our travel guru extraordinaire, says to go). We will be able to spend a few nights "camped" in K's aunt (actually his mom's cousin) in Basel, Switzerland, so that will be helpful -- we can leave suitcases there, for example.
Yeah, I'm excited! And I will probably blog much more about his trip in between now and July. And, hopefully I'll blog a lot of the trip as well!
Have you been to Europe? Or the Middle-East? Do you like traveling abroad? I love it, I'd do it all the time if I could!
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