Where Are We Going?

If we’re going to have a travel blog, at least some mention should be made as to where we are headed before we start to arrive. Future posts will more than likely go into more detail, but this is what we know so far.

It won’t take long.

We leave Chicago today, at 6:45pm local time, and fly to Dublin on Aer Lingus. After arriving in Dublin, we’ll need to find a hostel to stay in as we never planned that far ahead.

After a few days enjoying the city, we’ll probably be ready to move about the country. While we’re huge fans of the West coast in Ireland, we’ve never made it South, so there is a good chance travel will start off in that direction. Once we do get far enough West, we’ll head back up to Killarney to meet up with friends, have a few walks in the National Park, and visit all the familiar spots. This is all subject to changes on the whim and could end up being completely different than described.

The only thing we know for sure is that we’ll need to hop on a Ferry from somewhere to Holyhead, Wales on May 5th. We’ll stay one night in Holyhead and then hop on the train to London Euston in the morning.

Once we’re in London, we’ll have a day to bum around by ourselves before our good friends join us for a couple weeks of traveling through England and Wales. We know for sure that we’ll be in London through May 12th and then up to Oxford for a couple nights in one of the colleges.

After the stay in Oxford, we’ll be back to winging it. By then everyone will have a good idea of what we want to see and where we want to see it from for the next week before returning to London for one more night.

May 21st, our friends will leave us in London. Michelle and I will hop on the train from London to Paris and spend a few days seeing the sights and determining whether or not we should come back and spend some real time one day.

Some time in the last week of May, we’ll take another train down to Bayonne in South-West France. Depending on how things are going, we’ll either quickly or slowly work our way towards Saint Jean Pied de Port, where the Camindo de Santiago will begin for us.

For the next so many days (probably 40ish), we’ll be walking on foot with our packs from Saint Jean Pied de Port to Santiago de Compostela as part of the very popular pilgrimage.

That’s where the fairly detailed stuff ends.

We may keep walking another couple days to officially hit the West coast of Spain. A trip to Madrid and Barcelona is almost definitely in order. Who knows how much decompression time we’ll need after finishing that walk. We may sleep for weeks. 🙂

If all goes well, the next stop may be near Istanbul, where we have a good lead on a farm that we could work at in exchange for room and board. Either way, we’ll need to hop away from the Schengen Area for a bit in order to make it easier to manage the visa requirements of a US citizen traveling long term in Europe. Our plans go to completely wide open once the walk is done, so we won’t know until we get there.