Some plus-es, though, while we were there were the time spent with family that came in, catching up with my cousin Lori who lives there, I had a job interview while there, and we decided to book a trip to Israel -- the last of the Spring season.
We are well behind, though, on our other travel plans and moving plans, and have found out Stephen will have to do some pre-reading for his MBA programme which means we reasonably need to get to Denver no later than mid August to allow him time to do that.
With time being crunched from both ends on our travels, we have decided to change our travel plans a bit. We of course have Israel June 9-18, and then we decided to add 3 days in Vienna on the way back since our flights were connecting through there.
We've also decided to save India and Nepal for a subsequent trip. Steve is still very keen to do the OzBus London to Sydney trip, and these countries would be covered by that trip. So we've decided to put this portion of our Summer 2011 trip on hold for a year or two to see if we can make the OzBus fit into our lives somewhere before we have kids. If not, we'll take a 3-4 week stand alone trip to India and Nepal in the upcoming years. (My mother has said that she'll help watch any little ones we have by that point to make sure we don't miss out on this. It is SOOOO good to know our mothers are both supportive of helping out so we don't have to give up travel completely once kids come along).
We are still planning on Laos and Thailand, though, and are looking to extend our time there to 4-5 weeks to really dig in to the culture and landscape. We have yet to book it, but we are looking at a company called StrayTravel.com/asia which operates a hop-on, hop-off guided service through northern Thailand and the entire length of Laos. We were just going to do the northern leg of that trip, but now we're looking to do the 'Full Moon' which includes jungles, heritage sights, elephant rides, journey's down the Mekong River and stays in remote villages. On top of that we'll have 3-4 days in Bangkok on either side of that excursion, and hopefully a 3-4 day stay at a Thai beach resort in Phuket or Koh Samui. We expect we'll leave London for Thailand/Laos sometime the week of July 10th.
So we're off to Israel this afternoon for 10 days on a Holy Land tour with OakHall.co.uk, then 3.5 days in Vienna beginning on June 18th.
We've been talking about doing both a trip to Israel and a trip to Vienna for 4-5 years now, so it is exciting to see it happening. We're also extra excited about Vienna because we'll be meeting up with our friends Carol and Herb Traxler!
Well, it's off to Israel! I'll try to keep you posted on our adventures along the way should I get a good wi-fi signal.
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