Our plans for our trip so far are:
- Fly into Dublin, Ireland and spend two days teaching Theo about time changes.
- Settle in a cottage near Skibbereen, Ireland and take lots of walks with sheep.
- Take the ferry to France, and spend a week trotting around Paris.
- Settle into Lyon for a month, making frequent trips to Parc de la Tete d’Or.
- Possibly spend another month or so in rural France. We’d like to make the most of the perfect French skills we will have developed while staying in Paris and Lyon. (Hah.)
After that? Who knows. Our plan is make our decisions based on what we learn in the first few months.
Our list of ideas of other places we might stay is: Turkey, Croatia, Iceland, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Costa Rica, Argentina, New Zealand, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Tanzania, and South Africa.
However, we’d love your advice!
- If you could live anywhere for a month, where would it be, and why?
- What exciting things should we eat/see/experience while there?
- Are there interesting ways to get to or travel within the country?
- What should we book ahead (accommodation, train tickets, activities, etc.) and what should we just find when we arrive? If we should book stuff ahead, what’s the best way to do so?
We are looking for:
- Places that are lovely to live in, versus just places that are awesome for sightseeing. We plan to settle into most places for about a month, with some shorter, in-transition jaunts thrown in for fun.
- Green-space and livability over nightlife and hedonistic pleasures, since we’ll be traveling with our toddler. (Okay, we’d probably value green-space and livability over nightlife and hedonistic pleasures even if we weren’t traveling with a toddler, but he’s a good excuse.)
- Internet access, since we’re both freelancing part-time as we travel. It’s possible that we might take time off in the second half of the trip to go somewhere more remote, but for most of the trip, connectivity is important.
We’d like to avoid flying for the first 10 months, so we’re looking for places that we can reach via train or ferry within and near Europe. After that, we’re open to the world.