A New Adventure Begins

The day has arrived. The decision has been made. The non-refundable tickets have been purchased. This is the end of the beginning planning stages. Now it is time for the beginning of the end planning stages. It will be a long process - sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating but always interesting and educational. I will share it all with you...

...but not here. This blog site will be the archive for a new blog pointed toward the future. Please visit at;

lee-reidfamilytravels.blogspot.com

The secret will be unveiled the weekend after Thanksgiving.

To be continued...

June 8th

Let me tell you the tale of the 8th day of June. It is a magical day. Under normal circumstances, it would be magical mainly because it is the day after the last day of school (at least for students) for both Michelle and I. But this year, the date has come to have special significance...

I have been doing a great deal of web searching for airfares to Australia and New Zealand and this is what I have discovered;

• There are very good fares available.
• These very good fares end June 8th (for departures). Depart after that date and you will pay 25-35% more, which is a deal killer for us.
• These fares are good for departures from Los Angeles, not from Minneapolis

So, as far as the potential for a trip to Australia & New Zealand is concerned, we are facing the question of whether or not it is practical to depart on the day after school lets out. There are many obvious drawbacks to this possibility, not the least of which is the fact that Michelle usually works several days after that last day of school (though she is not expected to) and that I may actually be expected to work the next few days. Add to that the general stress involved for everyone in the family at that end-of-school-year time and combine it with the stress to be expected for trip departure preparation and it may be a dangerous combination.

But it is tremendously tempting to try it. Not only is the airfare for the long distance flights quite reasonable on June 8th, but on Quantas, the Australian airline, you can also book numerous relatively short flight options for a discount in combination with the longer flights. Oddly, it doesn't matter that all of these flights would occur after June 8th. In fact, the initial flight departing from Los Angeles would depart at ... get this ... 11:50 PM on June 8th!! but no matter, it's June 8th, and non-summer high season pricing applies. Leave the next day and the same flights are $2000 more for our family. Kind of insane, isn't it?

But anyway, getting back to those multiple flights, here is one example (of at least a dozen possibilities) that I like because it allows us to avoid backtracking on the ground and puts the farthest south locations (where it would be coldest) earlier in the trip, before their winter really kicks in;

• June 8th; Fly LA to Auckland, NZ (on the northern part of the northern island), recover from jet lag and see a bit of NZ's largest city.
• June 12th; Fly to Christchurch, NZ (midway down the southern island) and rent a car. Spend 12 days meandering about 1000 miles back north toward Auckland.
• June 24th; Fly from Auckland to Sydney & spend 5 nights there.
• June 29th; Fly from Sydney to tropical Cairns on the far north coast, near the Great Barrier Reef. Rent a car & stay for a week in a cottage rental there, then drive south to the Whitsunday Islands area and spend a week in a cottage rental there, then drive south to Brisbane.
• July 15th; return the car & fly to LA from Brisbane.

Those three additional flights allow us to cover a great deal of territory very efficiently and only add about $150/person extra to the cost of the two long flights. That's an amazing bargain.

What's that you say? Yes, I know we don't live in Los Angeles. This whole scenario also depends on getting a separate (hopefully cheap) flight to LA to take advantage of the discount options available there. Don't worry, I've taken all that into account. The whole thing would still cost more than we have ever spent on airfare for any trip, just not obscenely more...

...like it would if we tried to do exactly the same thing departing 15 minutes later...

...on June 9th.

Down Under

[click on the map for a larger, clearer view]

Who wouldn't want to go to Australia? Last week I dialed a 1-800 number for multi-city inquiries at Virgin Australia airlines (because their web site oddly did not allow for multi-city options) and I talked to a woman in Australia. Her accent made me melt. Unfortunately, the cost for the type of flight I was inquiring about just made me chuckle and say "...well, thank you anyway...."

A trip like this is a very different beast, in several different ways. The first issue that must be addressed is whether or not to insist upon visiting New Zealand as well. Given the fact that flights between the two are relatively cheap, the two are culturally connected, and the great unlikelihood of doing both separately within the next decade, I would have to say yes, it would be very wise to do them both at once.

However, that requires that we accept the notion that we will come nowhere close to seeing all their is to see of either place. Australia is huge. It would take a full year there, circling the continent (without even venturing much into the outback) to say you saw even most of it. So it's not rational to bother much with the idea of wanting to see all there is to see. New Zealand, on the other hand, is a manageable size. You could see a great deal of it in one 5-week trip. But I don't think we would enjoy such a lengthy, in-depth trip there during their winter, only to return to the prospect of another 6-months of cold in Minnesota just around the corner. The opportunity to spend more than a week there during their summer won't come until we are retired - who knows when.

So the best plan would be to spend about two weeks in chilly New Zealand and about three weeks in Australia, most of that between Brisbane and Cairns along the northeastern coast, where the weather is more tropical and temperatures are between 70 and 80 during the day, even in winter.

Arranging flights would be the biggest hurdle. Several major carriers fly from the US west coast to Australia or New Zealand. Few fly to both. Fewer still offer flights from Minneapolis. So coming up with a flight plan that wouldn't be completely impossible to afford would likely involve cobbling together a number of different flights including cris-crossing routes between the two destinations. The path shown on the map is just one of many possibilities, but it does illustrate the challenge. We could fly into Sydney, spend a few days there, then take a discount flight to Auckland, NZ. There we could rent a car and meander south toward the small city of Christchurch. From there we can take a flight to Cairns, Australia, stay for a week or more and then gradually work our way south by car to Brisbane. From there we can get a direct flight to the US west coast. Similar ground could be covered any number of other ways, too. But we would want to avoid having to backtrack as much as possible to catch the next flight. The more logical path, of course, would be to fly into NZ from the US and out of Australia to the US, but that would require using the same airline for both flights, and that is unlikely to be the most economical option even though, in a rational world, it would be.

Roman Holiday

[Click on each image to get a much larger, clearer view]

We have been waiting for Italy since even before we took our first big trip with children in 2007. We knew we wanted to wait until the children were at the ideal age before going. That ideal age is when our oldest (15 next summer) is still young enough to want to travel with us and our youngest (then 8) is old enough to remember it well into adulthood. Ideally, I think it might be wise to wait another year or two for Joshua to get older. But then again, you never know when Annie's life will get more complicated and she would prefer to stay home with her friends, or for a job, or a camp, or another school-related trip abroad. Who knows what the future will bring. As I mentioned in previous posts, it would also seem wise to take a year off from Europe's millenia-old sights and go somewhere else in order to appreciate them more. But it is hard to say no (or not yet) to such a great place to visit.

This trip could be done any number of ways. I have outlined three here in this post. The first, "Plan A" detailed above, would be the most simple and relaxing (click on the photo to see my red lines better - the little thin red lines imply day trips from a location where we would stay for three to seven nights). This one involves flying into Venice, then traveling west by train to the Cinque Terra (a collection of five cliff side villages only accessible for tourism for the last 30 years or so). Then we would train to a central location near Florence where we would rent a car and spend a week in Tuscany, seeing the small cities of Florence, Pisa, Lucca and Sienna and numerous small Tuscan hilltop villages. We could even spend two weeks here, in two locations - one to the north, where we would spend more time seeing the small cities, and one more to the south, where we would focus on the villages.

Then we would turn in the car and train to Rome, spending a full week in an apartment there. While there, we could take a long day-trip past Naples to Pompeii (a common tourist trek). We would then fly home from Rome.

Plan B would involve seeing more of southern Italy (overlooked by most American tourists) including the island of Sicily. The trip would begin with all the stops of the first option above, but with only a week spent between the cities and towns of Tuscany in favor of an extra week spent in Sicily, making day trips from a cottage rental somewhere centrally located there. We would then have to catch a short flight from Palermo to a more major airport for the flight home.

Plan C would be the most culturally all-inclusive because it would include 7-10 days in Croatia, a place culturally connected to Italy but more like the Italy of 40 years ago - less overrun by tourists and a tad more exotic. The short, but bloody war that took place there 20 years ago is now a faded memory. Most of the damage has been repaired, new borders have separated those who didn't get along and the country is becoming a very welcoming place for slightly more adventuresome tourists. The time for this diversion would come at the expense of seeing Sicily - a fair trade, in my opinion. It would also likely involve a small change in overall itinerary. We would instead begin by flying into Milan and going directly to the Cinque Terra area, getting to Venice at the end of the trip after traveling north through Croatia and through Slovenia. This plan requires us to take a ferry to Dubrovnik across the Adriatic from the less-visited eastern side of Italy.

An alternative that would eliminate the need for the extra distance and the ferry, would be to find a way to start the trip by flying into Dubrovnik and then traveling to Venice and continuing on like plan A, flying home from Rome.

Most major airlines serving Italy and Croatia are significantly more expensive to use than our previous flights. To get a comparable "bargain" airfare that would get us to this corner of Europe will require some creativity. We would either have to use one of the many bargain airlines within Europe to connect from a less expensive major city, or a long train ride from a city like Munich or Paris, which are served by our old friends at IcelandAir.

Celtic Celebration

[click on the map to get a larger, clearer view]

Here is the first of three or more posts outlining our possible family trip for the summer of 2011. I decided to start with this one because, while I think we will do this some time relatively soon, I think it's the least likely of the leading candidates for next year. The reasons were outlined in past posts. But this one is still in the running because it would likely be the cheapest airfare of the three major choices. So if we decide to keep costs as low as possible, this choice would get preference.

The idea is to visit Ireland (which we have never visited even though we have been through Great Britain twice) and combine it with the Scottish highlands, which we have never seen. These two areas are historically and culturally connected as well. Millenia ago, the people who settled Scotland moved on to settle Ireland - thus the common Celtic heritage. In the 1600's (after Ireland and Scotland's cultures had begun to diverge somewhat), ruling England decided to try to colonize the unruly Irish and blunt the effect of their Catholic tradition by transplanting Protestant Scots in the counties to the north. This is what eventually led to the "troubles" and the ultimate splitting of Ireland into two unequal parts and, in the early 20th century, to the free Republic of Ireland while Northern Ireland continues to belong to Great Britain.

We would likely try to fly open-jaw Into and out of Dublin, Ireland and Glasgow, Scotland, taking a ferry the short distance across the water separating the two land masses. Which one comes first wouldn't matter much, but for some reason I always envision Ireland being first. The final choice would likely just depend on what low priced flights were available. We would get around mostly by rental car as rail service is limited and the areas are mostly rural. Driving distances would be relatively short, but twisty, narrow rural roads would also be slow driving at times.

The choice of airlines to fly and cities to fly into and out of are, of course, intertwined and more complex than it seems like it should be. Our favorite low-cost airline - IcelandAir - flies into Glasgow, so that is a natural choice. But they do not fly to Ireland. Aer Lingus - the Irish national airline - flies into Dublin from the US and does offer a short connecting flight to Glasgow, but they do not fly from Minneapolis. The nearest hub is Chicago. Flying into and out of the same city on this trip would require wasted time and money backtracking. Other airlines are usually more expensive. So the flight situation, while probably more economical than other trip options, is still complicated.

The only densely populated areas we would visit on this trip are Dublin (for just 2-3 days), Belfast (for just 1-2 days) and Glasgow (for just 2-3 days). And even these three cities are not really very large. The rest would be rural - and I mean really rural, as in most towns of just a few hundred to a few thousand residents. This would be the most rural trip we have ever taken, by far, even including the trips we have taken within the US. The beauty of rural Ireland and the Scottish highlands is legendary. But I do have some concern that, after 3-4 weeks of seeing numerous, somewhat similar examples of this beauty, we might find ourselves tiring of it and yearning for some bustle of a real city.

The Forgotten Continent

It's fair to ask what our ultimate travel goal is. But all I can answer at this point is that it is a work in progress. The classic answer is that we want to see the world. But let's face it, there are many places we won't have the time or money to see, and there are plenty of places we have little real desire to see (mostly because they are not particularly safe or welcoming to visitors).

Focusing on Europe has been an obvious place to begin because it has a deep history we are familiar with and connected to, and because it is relatively comfortable, very safe, and perfectly suited for do-it-yourself tourism. That last point is particularly important for us because we have little interest in being guided through a visit anywhere. We don't have any interest in experiencing some sort of made-for-tourists tour from the windows of a bus - our route being carefully chosen to pass only the most attractive areas while the places people really live remain safely out of sight. We couldn't afford the extra cost involved in trips like that, anyway. Planning and executing the trip ourselves makes the overall experience much more educational and rewarding. A simple test a place has to pass for us to feel comfortable visiting might be the car rental test; We have to be able to rent a reliable car and drive it anywhere without worrying about getting lost to the point of putting ourselves in danger.

But that does put some serious constraints on where in the world we would consider visiting. There are many places, particularly across Africa and Asia, where there are potentially fascinating places to see but little realistic way to do it effectively or safely without either being guided or being sequestered from real local life by staying in places locals would never go. I know there are ways to partly overcome these challenges. I'm always running across stories of people having a wonderful time visiting places you never even considered would be well-suited for tourism. But we have a limited budget and young children, too. I wouldn't know where to begin planning a trip to China, Thailand, Tanzania or Madagascar. Maybe several years from now when I know more about these more exotic options, the children are old enough to be independent (or are too busy to join us at all) and some of these places have more tourism infrastructure in place, then we will give these locations more serious thought.

In the mean time, in addition to Australia and New Zealand, there are still many other places I would like to visit outside of Europe. Many places in Central America have become mini tourism hot spots recently. Costa Rica seems to have evolved into one giant eco-tourism resort.

But the place my curiosity keeps coming back to is South America. Our neighbor to the south that you don't even have to cross an ocean to get to, is almost completely forgotten as a place of interest for most Americans. It seems to reside in a sort of tourism no-man's-land. North America is home. Africa is more dark and mysterious. Asia is more exotic. Australia is more familiar. Europe is more classic. There is something for everyone in those five choices. Perhaps South America simply lacks a tourism identity.

But from what little I know (and it is very little, indeed) South America seems to have a great deal to offer, including many wonders of nature, deep history, and interesting cities. Most intriguing, though, is that it seems to be populated by people going about their lives in relative peace, comfort and safety (at least compared to many other exotic locations) and yet their lives and lifestyles rarely ever enter our consciousness. I'll bet we know less about Peru than we do India; less about Argentina than New Zealand; less about Chile than Kenya. Why is that? It sparks my curiosity....

Undecided and confused...

I have been reading guide books for the last several weeks, but I am not one step closer to figuring out where we might go next. I am torn.

My initial impulse was to focus on Australia (and perhaps New Zealand) as a way to take a break from the common attractions of Europe. I have noticed that the typical visits to castles, cathedrals, and museums full of millenia-old artifacts has gotten somewhat less interesting over the last four trips. With the prospect of visiting Italy on the horizon, I don't want sites like that to get glossed over as merely "same-old, same-old..."

But the more I read about Australia and the Queensland/Great Barrier Reef area (where we would be likely to spend most of our time keeping warm during their "winter") the more I wonder about what we would do and how we would do it. We have developed a set of expectations for trips like these and Australia does not fit into those expectations. There are rain forests there, but how do you visit a rain forest effectively? There are some great beaches there, but how much time can you spend sitting on a beach? There are amazing islands to visit and dives at the reef, but those activities are terribly expensive to say nothing of the risks involved taking a family of non to barely adequate swimmers diving in a sea full of strange creatures.

Visiting Australia would be logistically awkward as well. We would be required to fly into Sydney. Then, once we have seen the city, we would have to drive some 1,400 miles to get to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. Worse, that drive is along a route that would take us past almost every tourist trap in Australia. I am envisioning 1,400 miles worth of strip malls and traffic moving infuriatingly slow. Then, of course, we would have to backtrack at least as far as Brisbane (900 miles) to fly home.

I have done some preliminary looking into lodgings and have discovered that, aside from youth hostels, the other options are not particularly economical for a family of five. After our hostel-filled trip this past year, it would be really nice to not focus on hostel stays next year. Also, the hostel web sites there have a distinctly college-age-party vibe that you don't find so much in Europe and I would rather avoid.

All other things being equal, New Zealand actually seems more appealing to me, if for no other reason than because it is more off the beaten track and it's sights are distributed all around the two large islands and not focused along one long beachfront. Unfortunately, their winter is really winter, with temps in the south approaching freezing. I don't think we could enjoy that, nor do I think that's the best time for a once-in-a-lifetime visit.

On top of it all, even with cutting every possible corner it would still costs at least $2,000 more than any of our previous trips. For a guaranteed fantastic time, that would be worth it. The problem is, at this point, I don't feel that it would be a guaranteed fantastic time.

Then there is Italy. We will go there sometime in the next three years. I have read the guide books. I pretty much know exactly how I would like to do it and I am confident we would find good and affordable lodgings. I am certain I could keep costs in line with past trips while doing everything we would want to see and do. I just don't know how wise it is to either see this great area while Joshua is so young (he would be 8) that he might not remember it well, or as trip number five in a row of European castles, cathedrals, museums and Roman ruins. I fear some of the magic could be dulled.

I have read up on Ireland & Scotland as well. That seems like a pleasant trip. But that holds many of the same pitfalls already mentioned about Italy. How much mystical magic can we feel looking at Ireland's piles of 1000-year-old rocks when that's what we have done the last four trips in a row? As pleasant as the trip might be, I don't think it has as much of an upside as the trip to Italy would. So if we were going to take the 5-consecutive-years-seeing-Europe plunge, I would rather it be to Italy.

This all begs the question "Is there somewhere else in the world we could go and see something amazing while staying safe and comfortable and not breaking the bank?" I don't know. Any ideas?...