This travel business is an odd thing. One minute you’re landing in another country for the first time, and the next minute you’re on another continent all together. The time between is filled with food, music, words, and buildings you’ve never seen or heard before, your senses are overwhelmed, and your dreams are met. And it all flies by entirely too quickly.
Case in point: we’ve been traveling for over 7 months now. That sounds strange, doesn’t it? We’re no longer newbies at this whole round-the-world gig. Our trip, depending on when we return, could potentially be half over at this point.
Given we often write about a place after we’ve left it, it can be a bit confusing from time to time. So here’s a breakdown of where we’ve been so far:
- 3 months in Argentina
- 10 days in Uruguay (after our 1st week in Argentina, then we went back to Argentina)
- 20 hours in Chile (I only mention it because it sounds so silly)
- 5 weeks in Peru
- 2 months in Ecuador (including 8 days in the Galapagos Islands)
- 3 weeks in Spain
- 2 weeks in England
- And, thus far, 2 days in Turkey
There are so many things we haven’t written about and those are the stories that we’ll tell when we return home. (What better way to ease ourselves back into our day-to-day life at home then to spend it daydreaming and writing about our trip?)
For example, we spent 2 months in Ecuador and haven’t written nearly everything there is to say about our time there. Our time in the Amazon Jungle, for one, is something that we’ll have to wait to tell more about. But let there be no confusion: Ecuador just may be our most favorite country in the whole world. In fact, it just might beat out our first love: Argentina.
After Ecuador, we spent 3 weeks in Spain, but we’ve only written 2 entries on Spain so far. There are more stories to tell of our time there, most certainly, but we’re too eager to tell you about England and now, Turkey. So poor Spain will have to wait for a little bit. We hope that’s ok.
We’ve had a noticeable itinerary change to the trip that was the result of two things: (1) we spent longer in South America than we originally intended (which means it’s now Fall, nearing Winter in Europe), and (2) Europe is damn expensive.
As a result, we’ve cut the Greek Islands and Italy. We decided those are two places we simply can’t cut corners on. In the Greek Islands we want to be able to island hop and not worry about the cost of the ferries, and we want to have a gorgeous room by the Mediterranean and not freeze in the December weather. And Italy, well, it goes without saying that a trip to Italy wouldn’t be a trip to Italy unless we could eat and drink all we wanted without feeling guilty when we looked in our wallets afterwards. So these two places, the Greek Islands and Italy, will be saved for a future trip or two.
We also cut Egypt, though we made that decision several months ago and it had nothing to do with the weather or the prices. It might sound silly, but we cut Egypt simply because it didn’t feel right to us this time around. We both realized independently that whenever we talked about visiting Egypt, we started feeling stressed. Sure we want to see Egypt and of course we want to marvel at all its sights, but something didn’t feel right about it for us right now. And whether that’s because of things we’ve read in the news or not, I’m not sure, but we’ve learned to trust our instincts on this trip. And so Egypt will also have its own trip sometime in the future.
The result of these itinerary changes, though, is that we will now have 2 months (instead of only 1 month) in Turkey. And if the upcoming 2 months in Turkey are anything like the past 2 days, well, then that was a damn good decision because Turkey has been absolutely spectacular already. (And hopefully I haven’t jinxed us now either…)
With Tim’s latest entry, we feel we can leave the rest of our stories about the Galapagos Islands until a later date. We also feel good about skipping over our Spain stories and heading straight to our England ones. So over the next week or so, you’ll be reading all about two very happy hedgehogs visiting some of the loveliest people we’ve ever met, eating ridiculously good English food, walking in the very woods that Tolkein walked in before writing Lord of the Rings, learning the proper way to pronounce the word “bottie,” and absolutely falling in love with that fair island.
(And after we catch you up on our visit to England, then we can tell you about a place called Istanbul – not Constantinople - because it must be one of the most magical places in the world.)
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