Planning: The Itinerary (Finally!)
It wasn’t easy, but after many, many hours of staring at maps, reading through travel books, looking at airfares, scouring flickr, talking to friends, and just plain ole daydreaming, I’ve finally nailed down a working itinerary!
I have to say, it took a lot for me to cut out places like Glasgow and Stockholm, but when it came down to which places had to get the axe, I tried to pick groupings that would logically form into a future trip: a trip to Scandinavia, for instance, would let me cover Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki and a bunch of other places instead of just the first two. Same goes for the UK. The UK seems like the easiest trip to make somewhere down the line and dedicating an entire trip to the UK would let me cover the more rural parts of England and also fit in Wales and a lot more of Ireland.
So, with the exception of London, none of those places will be included in my trip this summer.
The second bit that helped me to make a lot of big decisions was my initial desire to spend a decent amount of time in Rome or at least somewhere in Italy. I’ve always been a “depth and breadth” kind of person – I like to do a lot of things, but I also like the ability to focus on one or two things to learn in better detail. This was the major turning point in my mapping: spending a large chunk of time in Italy would let me get in the depth part (and hopefully will teach me some Italian along the way) while still letting me see all but a few of the cities on my last map.
With this itinerary, I get the best of both worlds: I get to spend a significant amount of time in Italy (23 days: nearly half of my trip!), but having 14 days in Rome to redistribute if needed gives me a huge amount of flexibility for adding in some secondary cities (the orange dots) or spending an extra day or two in a city that I especially like. Not to mention, having so much time in Rome might open up the possibility of an overnight trip to a place like Split, Croatia which Matt has been trying to sell me on for some time now.
I haven’t yet decided if I want to fly into Madrid and out of London (as I envisioned it as I was mapping this out) or the other way around. I think being able to get settled first would be really helpful, so starting in a country whose language I speak seems logical to me. (I obviously speak English, but my Spanish isn’t too shabby either). There are arguments for either case, but I’ll think on it a couple of days and then hopefully will be able to buy my plane tickets!
So without further ado, here it is!: (click to view larger)
Tags: Itinerary, map, Planning, transportation, travel
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SPLIT! Do it. Though it’s a bit far from Rome to make it an overnight trip.
Also, looking at your map there, wouldn’t it make more sense to fly into Portugal and then head into Spain if you wanted to start on the Iberian peninsula? TAP Air Portugal flies from Newark to Lisbon (or at least they did the last time I checked).
Ahh, but so is Athens. We’ll see about Split. Maybe I’ll just try to find a post card of it ;)
As for Lisbon – I’m not planning to go there at the moment. I just drew my plane line in the wrong spot. It’s marked as a “maybe” stop, so perhaps some rearranging could happen, but for now it’s Madrid -> Barcelona -> Rome. :)
[...] Planning: The Itinerary (Finally!) [...]
Oh goody, good! You’re making a s top through Spain. I would like to visit that country one day. I hope you take pictures of Spain so I can come back and see the essence of the Spanish culture.