After a lot of planning and years of anticipation we’re ready for our biggest adventure so far!
We’ve done a fair amount of travelling in the past, but now we’re about to head off for just over three months to visit 5 countries and check that the world really is round! We are writing this blog to help our friends and family keep up to date with where we are and what we’ve been up to (not easy at the best of times!) we’ll try to share the best of our pictures too.
Our past travels have taken us to many wonderful places both at home and abroad. Claire has always been keen to explore new places and went interrailing in her first summer at university and Gareth spent a year of his degree in the USA and spent the summer road tripping around the North West. The following year, just after we’d got together Claire travelled across Asia on the Trans-Mongolian Express and Gareth has been jealous ever since.
Since we’ve been together we’ve had a couple of big trips. We went to Vietnam, Laos and Singapore in 2015 and Ecuador and Peru in 2017. As well as this we’ve been on loads of trips all over the UK and in Europe, including Paris, Amsterdam, Munich and the German alps and an awesome road trip around Iceland last year. So as you can probably tell we’ve really got the travel bug.
This next amazing trip will take us across Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka (sorry Nepal and Central America – we just couldn’t quite fit you in – next time!). As our friends will confirm, the two of us are quite different in our view of what constitutes as ‘too busy’ in terms of an itinerary. However, we can happily report that we reached a balanced compromise with this trip – with Claire agreeing to approximately 5 days (of 98) without ‘must do’ activities!
- 31 August to 22 September – Canada
- 23 September to 13 October – Japan
- 14 October to 27 October – Australia
- 28 October to 21 November – New Zealand
- 22 November to 5 December – Sri Lanka
There’s a definite sport theme to our trip; not only has the order of countries been dictated by the Rugby World Cup and the England cricket tour of New Zealand (obviously Claire’s highlight), but it just so happens that a number of our Friday night accommodation choices are ideally placed for parkrun the next morning. Add in Hinton’s Run in the Rockies, the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage trail and the Tongariro Alpine Crossing and we might just burn off all the amazing food and drink we are sure to sample on the way!
Whilst we away, we are very lucky to have the lovely Alex housesitting with George, Emily and Di on hand to help and some fantastic colleague’s covering our work. Thanks so much all of you – we owe you! So long and see you on the other side!
Claire and Gareth go travelling! 