The Forgotten Ones

Let me preface this story by saying that, originally, Steve was dead set on being gone no longer than 6 months. I was desperately trying to convince him into 9.

The research for our itinerary went something like this…

For Christmas 2010, Steve bought me two wonderful coffee table books that ended up being the backbone of our research – National Geographic’s Journeys of a Lifetime and Eyewitness Travel’s Where to Go When. We spent months reading through them and marking the places that we strongly wanted to consider visiting. After all, we have 6-9 WHOLE MONTHS of no obligations! That is a ton of time, and so let’s just say we marked desired locations very liberally. I’m only slightly embarrassed to admit that even Antarctica was on our original list.

One Sunday evening, we had an official family meeting at the dining table and attempted to prioritize the list based on our research.

We organized the list into three buckets:

(1) Non-negotiables

(2) Nice-to-haves

(3) If it happens to be along the route we’re already taking, we’ll stop to see it

It didn’t take long to look at a map, crunch a few numbers and realize that we had completely and utterly misjudged how big the world is! We were instantly humbled.

It took a few days to pick our deflated spirits up off the floor. We went back and read advice on some of our trusted travel blogs. They pretty unanimously recommended that in 1 year, you should attempt to see no more than 3 regions of the world. Well that was a problem, because we had 5 regions on our list, and they all had non-negotiables in them.

What followed were several more long and tiring dining table sessions of negotiations and compromises. We jumped up to 11 months, and sadly, had to identify some martyrs.

So here’s to the non-negotiables that ended up having to be negotiable after all:

   - Africa 

   - Patagonia 

   - Greece 

   - Cairo & The Red Sea

It will just make the day that we finally get to see them, that much sweeter.