We've finally solidified our travel plans. Sort of. We know what countries we're going to. That's pretty good for us. Unlike most people (and very out of character for me) Deanne and I don't mind having a loose schedule when it comes to travelling. As long as I know flight details, the rest can be as flexible and unstructured as it wants to be. Obviously we do our research beforehand and compile a list of places, things, etc that we want to see and do, but we don't really mind WHEN we do it. I think if you have a rigorous timetable set up, where every day and hour is planned for, you defeat the purpose of a vacation. My father has a policy of absolutely not wearing his watch when he's on vacation, "I eat when I'm hungry and sleep when I'm tired," he says.So where are we going? Well our long terms plans for Hong Kong were scuppered by outrageous hotel costs in Hong Kong (almost US$200 a night) so we had to look elsewhere. The only stipulation we had was that we couldn't go somewhere either of us had been before. Initially we thought the Carribean might be a good spot, but Deanne's not one for lounging around on the beach as much as I am. So we nixed that idea. We looked at Croatia, Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, and Turkey but couldn't settle on any of them.
Just as we were beginning to get frustrated, Deanne suggested Spain. Neither of us had been there, the weather should be good, sounded like a plan. Initially, we were only going to head to Spain but we happened to be watching Michael Palin's excellent series "Sahara" when we saw him take the ferry from Spain to Morocco. How cool, taking a ferry between continents. The seed had been planted. Our plans quickly changed in favor of more time in Morocco, less time in Spain.
We leave San Francisco on March 16th and arrive in London the next day where we jump on another plane to Malaga in southern Spain. We spend the night in Malaga and then go wherever the wind takes us. We have a tentative plan to head north to Seville (Sevilla) and then to Gibraltar. To get into Gibraltar you have to walk across the main runway of the airport. Then from Gibraltar, it's onto Tangier and Morocco. We haven't decided where in Morocco to go but I'm told that Marrakesh must not be missed.
I'm really looking forward to it as, to my great shame, it will be the first new country I've been to in almost eight years. Ugh, and I call myself a world traveller. I'm hoping 2005 will be a year of travel. We're already thinking about where to go in Aug/Sept, our next travel window. It looks like it will either be Japan or Australia. But that's another post altogether...
Anyway, I'm told that Morocco is surprisingly wired so expect one or two blog posts while we're there. Of course I'll be taking more than enough photos as well.