TRAVEL PLANS

My hubby keeps pestering me to decide where we should go on our next travel adventure. We had talked about Tuscany -- about renting a villa and staying in one spot for at least a couple of weeks, and just taking side trips out from there. The only downside would be that it requires renting a car and having to drive in a foreign country. We've done it before but, at our age, it doesn't really excite me. One of the couples staying at our hotel in San Miguel had been doing just that, and ended up being in a bad wreck which left them totally traumatized. Not my idea of a great vacation.

Then, just a few days ago, we got a couple of catalogs from Viking River and Ocean cruises -- a weekly occurrence since our one river cruise six years ago. I found myself thinking "Hmmmm, maybe we should just consider doing one of these again. It was ever so easy, letting them handle all the grunt work for us, and all we had to do was show up!" So, instead of taking these catalogs straight to the recycle bin as I usually do, I sat down and started flipping through them. What about this river cruise from Budapest to Bucharest? Or maybe the one in Portugal? We've never been to any of those places. Ooh! Ooh! Or what about this ocean cruise along the Mediterranean coast?

When I really took a closer look at the details, however, it all came back to me. The one tragic flaw in all their itineraries. The fact that, no matter where they go, by ocean or by river, you really only get one day in each city.

One day to absorb an entire city -- to capture the feel of a place and it's people. One day to figure out how they live and what they love.

We've done it many times before, but I suddenly realized that I just can't do it again. Not after our most recent adventures, where we got to spend an entire week each in Khartoum, Barcelona, and San Miguel de Allende (twice!). I guess we're spoiled now for any other form of travel, for though we still left those places feeling like we'd barely scratched the surface, they left an indelible mark on us and blessed us with memories to last a lifetime.  All those other cities we speed-traveled through? Pretty much a blur to us now. Never again.

As if I needed it, Synchronicity dropped by this week to strengthen my resolve. As you know, I've been going back through all my old journals before tossing them out, and just this week I reached the one where Hubby quit his job working offshore in Bahrain, and we took a whole month to travel through Europe on our way home.

All Aboard!

Seven countries. Ten cities. All in less than 30 days, with about a third of that time taken up with getting transported from one place to another, then trying to find a place to stay based on advice from our tattered copy of Europe On Ten Dollars A Day.

Wouldn't have missed it for the world, but...

No. Never again!