Before we left for Spain, I wrote quite a lot about how I had planned this trip. Then, while we were there, I wrote about what happened when the itinerary stopped cooperating. Now we’re home, the laundry is done, the wine we shipped back should arrive next week, and I’ve had enough distance to look at the […]

In my last newsletter, I wrote that everything about our Spain itinerary made sense on paper. Now I was going to find out which decisions actually held up once we were living inside it. Spain didn’t make me wait very long for answers. Last week we left our hotel in Mallorca at 7:30am for our […]

We leave for Spain today, and the itinerary is finally finished. Which means I’ve reached the point where there isn’t much left to plan, but there is plenty left to question. For part of our trip, I worked with two local destination specialists in Spain—these are the companies travel advisors use on the ground to […]

We live in the Pacific Northwest, so by February, deep enough into winter that the season has stopped feeling new, warmth stops being a preference and the cold becomes something that needs correction. The trouble is doing that from the PNW in February isn’t especially convenient. The obvious short-haul answers, Hawaii, Mexico, Costa Rica, Caribbean, […]

My last issue was about how our Spain trip took shape: the flight credit, the back-and-forth between known and new, the itinerary trifecta, and how we landed on five stops. This one picks up the thread I mentioned then: how close some of that came to not working out at all, and what almost losing […]

It’s been longer than usual between posts. Our son got married at the end of August and most of the last month since we returned from our Iceland and Norway trip was consumed by activities surrounding that. Between the wedding and my growing client list, Spain planning (and the newsletter) got less of my attention […]

Most trips unfold pretty close to plan. This one didn’t always, and by the time we’d been at sea a few days, we’d stopped being surprised when the schedule changed. Some days ended up better for the change, some were simply different. That unevenness ended up shaping the trip a little differently than we had […]

I’m writing this from our cabin on the Scenic Eclipse I in comfy clothes while Greg naps. The ship is about to leave Húsavík, Iceland. The North Atlantic, it turns out, does not particularly care about our planned itinerary. More on that next week. Before all this, there was London. Last week I wrote about […]

Every year, a short list of curated journeys lands in our inbox from a vacation club that we belong to — trips already vetted, already designed, already priced. Greg and I go through them together, which sounds civilized but usually involves some negotiation. Last February, he landed on an Iceland and Norway expedition cruise. I […]

Packing for a week on a catamaran is strange compared to other types of warm weather vacations. You need swimsuits, a cover-up, some t-shirts and comfortable shorts. That’s nearly the whole list. After three newsletters this month built around logistics, access, and the kind of planning that takes months, this one starts with the opposite: […]