Mike and I have started our vacation adventure and to share it with you we are keeping the notes and stories and pictures of our trip on this site. Apologies for the two year gap between this and my last post.

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If you’ve just been randomly cruising around the Internet and happened upon this site – Welcome to you, too! The greatest joy in travel is the random chaos that allows strangers to cross paths and share a moment of humanity together. That is, unless you are a hacker or a hater or one of those robo-intelligent-thingies that is going to take over the world, in which case, buzz off, your kind is not welcome.

So, to get started, I’ll confess that one of my greatest thrills is receiving that email “SUBJECT: Time to check in for your flight.” This one was especially thrilling because we had spent such a very long time in the planning. Boarding passes in hand, and thanks to our awesome friend Bill who chauffeured us from Fox Island to Seatac, we arrived comfortably early to ease into our trip. I’ve taken so many business trips over the years that merely passing through airport Security isn’t itself cause for cheer; however, cozying up to the Iceland Air gate made it sink in that this was no business trip. That magic moment when the wheels lifted off the ground we were on vacation.

Click here to see our itinerary  color coded for each segment of the trip: Pink for home, blue for France, green for the Danube river trip and yellow for Croatia. Feel free to follow along, and if you have a tip from your travels to any of these locations, please do write a comment so we can try to fit it in. Many of the locations we’ve already added were from the suggestions of friends. PS: I’ve already broken my promise to indicate pronunciation for the Croatian cities – I promise to do that (indicate pronunciation, not break a promise) throughout the trip.

Enjoy!