What’s ahead in 2020?

Happy New Year! It’s hard to believe 2019 is coming to a close! It has been a fantastic year of travel and both Steven and I are still a bit shell-shocked that we actually pulled off this whole moving to Europe thing. It’s been a blast, but to be honest, it feels like we’ve barely gotten started. In 2020, that will all change as we are going full-throttle this year!

What’s on the horizon? Well for starters, Morocco! Once we arrive back in Portugal we will take a few days to recover from jetlag then it’s through southern Spain and onto the ferry to Tangiers! We are very excited about this trip as we plan to spend a few weeks traveling to some major cities as well as in the Atlas Mountains.

Morocco welcomes thousands of RVers every year so services are plentiful. There’s not a lot of boondocking, but campsites are plentiful and cheap. It is a completely different environment, of course, being a Muslim country, but its one that I am familiar with having spent more than a decade in Libya as a teenager and young adult. Morocco is likely to be as close as I can ever get to showing Steven what it was like where I grew up! I am so excited about that!

Once we leave Morocco we’ll spend the next couple of months making our way across Spain, France and into northern Italy. We’ve got Venice on our itinerary, then it’s on to Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and into the Baltics. We’ll make our way through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia before hopping on a ferry to Helsinki, Finland!

Our goal is to spend the summer in Scandinavia, mostly Norway. But before we leave Helsinki we will park Bijou and take a 72-hour trip to St. Petersburg! Russia was not on our list of countries originally, but we can enjoy 72 hours there visa-free, so why not? Fingers crossed for good weather so we can visit the Hermitage Museum, the Winter Palace and so on. We are very excited about this stop!

Back in Finland we will begin making our way to Nordcapp, Norway at the tippy top of the country in hopes of finding some midnight sun. We’ll then head south and mosey along the coast, taking little hops on the local ferries to get across the fjords. Maybe we will learn to fish, because in Norway you don’t need a license for coastal fishing and it’s super expensive to buy food. We’ll see how well that works out. I’m sure there are a ton of YouTube videos we can watch. 🙂

We plan to arrive in Germany sometime in September, then on to Switzerland. This is another place I can’t wait to show Steven, as I spent three years in Lugano at boarding school and graduated from The American School in Switzerland (TASIS) in 1975. Each year after we returned to school from the Christmas holidays the entire student body would meet up in St. Moritz for a few weeks of skiing. We would have classes early in the morning and then hit the slopes! It was a wonderful time in my life and I am eager to return there. I know it’s been decades since I’ve been there and it will all have changed, but somehow I think it will still be meaningful to me.

After Switzerland we’ll head through Italy and finally begin to slow down. Our goal is to then find a place in Sicily where we might spend some rest time before heading home for the holidays, but if not there, we might well continue on to Greece. All told we’ll probably visit 20 or so countries and travel 10,000 miles or more. That is less distance than most years we traveled in the States, but European travel is much different, so its going to feel like a lot more! As for the exact route, we’ll just have to see how it all shakes out. All I know for now is that it looks good on paper. 🙂

One final change for 2020, a new blog site. Steven has been working hard to migrate our blog from Blogger to WordPress, so bear with us if there are hiccups along the way! If you haven’t signed up for notifications, please do so! Happy New Year, everyone!

NEXT UP: Into Morocco!

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