Trip planning
I’ve been planning a world trip for ages, but never to the point before where I’ve actually assembled cash. It was originally planned for the end of 2001, when spiv finished university and I finished my comp sci and maths degree &mdash clearly that never happened.
However, this time I have funds earmarked. and spiv has funds set aside through the Nature of Spiv, which involves always earning twice what your needs demand, or alternatively desiring to spend only half of what you earn. And there’s some odds in favour of spiv being actually able to work on the road and therefore able to come, although we may well be misjudging.
Here’s the rough schedule, open to change by up to a month in either direction at this stage, and subject to the deletion of entire continents at will:
- mid September-early October: North America. Definite stops: Pan Alto (Stanford), New York. Likely stops: DC.
- early October – November: Europe. Definite stops: London. Likely stops: Spain, Czech Republic, Latvia.
- late November (in the unlikely event we can afford this): Asia. No idea what we’d do here. Well, lots of ideas, no commitments. Japan is the most likely of about a million choices.
Assuming funds are available, and I’m sure I am being laughable optimistic, adding two or three more stops on each continent would be really great. I’m toying with driving across the USA, but I think it’s just the challenge of reversing all my reflexes, and isn’t as good an idea as it sounds.
Where my loyal readers come in
Here is your once in a lifetime* opportunity to influence our itinerary! If you what to put your oar in concerning any of the following, please do:
- travel tips (no, seriously, I love that kind of thing, unload your advice onto me);
- must see countries/towns/secessionist villas that somehow have been left off my detailed plans above;
- cheap places to stay, with convenient access to natural beauty, art museums, sites of interest to a nascent WWII nut, Twisted hackers, LinuxChix chapters, bloggers I want to fangirl or weirdly cheap pre-winter snowboarding sites with lots of beginners runs; or
- people we know of who have floorspace available in any continent mentioned above and are willing to have us stay. (I hope this goes without saying: noone should feel obliged.)
Our itinerary, at least until Asia, is going to be influenced equally by the properties ‘cheap’, ‘good’, and ‘proximity to people we want to meet’, travelling salesman problems and “pick any two of three” taunts notwithstanding.
Please note that a hypatia lifetime, patent pending, is a duration of not less than about three years. I’ve got enough upheavals planned for the next three years without suddenly jetting around the world again. Moving is conceivably a different matter.