I really like planning my journeys.  I like spending many hours googling places I’ve never visited. I like looking for good places to stay – affordable places – on AirBnB. I like finding bargains such as very low cost flights to Europe. I like studying maps, learning the most logical way to move from one place to the next and finding interesting places I’ve never visited near by.  I like thinking about going back to some of my favorite places – England is high on my list this year, despite being very expensive. I like finding great websites that I can share with you!

I plan to fly to Europe in early December. I’ll go to two places I haven’t seen before: the Alsace-Lorraine region of eastern France and the one major country in western Europe that I’ve never been to: Switzerland. Then I’m going to return to one of my most favorite cities, Venice, for Christmas.

In January I’m going to volunteer at a job-training program for women and girls in Morocco. Soon I’ll be writing about how to find a worthwhile and trustworthy volunteer placement agency. There are a lot of phony “voluntourism” companies on the web.

And that’s just the beginning!  I hope to travel for all of 2019. I’ll be 71 years old then and this will be my “bucket list” tour (a phrase I hate but I think it tells you succinctly why I’m taking a very long journey).

I plan to spend much of my travel time in eastern Europe, in the countries that once were behind the Iron Curtain. As a guide in Montenegro once told me, “Madame, we have no McDonalds in our entire country.” No American hotels, no Starbucks either. Under the Soviet Union many beautiful old buildings survived simply because it was cheaper to use them than to replace them. Since those countries have become independent governments they have made it a point to preserve their architectural heritage and improve upon it. Many beautiful old cities are tucked away in those small countries. And I do like cities.

So I hope you’ll come back to my blog, to learn some new ways for planning travel.

Libbie

The photo at the top is Perast, Montenegro, where they have no McDonalds!