Where to Next?

It’s been a few months since my last vacation (4 months) and I am starting to get the itch to plan a trip and to have something to look forward to. I know 4 months doesn’t seem like a long time between your last vacation and knowing when and where you will go again. Work has been crazy busy and I did not take a lot of time off from work during the summer so to me, 4 months seems like a long time.

My travel buddy and I started talking vacations a few months ago because a lot of people in our travel group from South Africa that we have kept in touch with have either planned vacations or have been on several trips already. We first started thinking where each of us respectively would like to go. We both have our own travel bucket lists that we want to check off. We have different places on our lists and we would like to go some place where both of us would like to go. We first started looking in Bali. Seeing the beautiful beaches, the amazing bungalows you can stay in and the many places we could visit. We priced our airfare (hello another trip that requires 24 hours of travel) and places to stay. Before we booked rumblings started about a possible volcano eruption (pun intended). We were both extremely busy with work at the time that word started that Bali had not 1 but 2 possible volcanoes that may erupt and at the time there were evacuations on the island. Since we really didn’t know what was going on and we decided to push that trip to the side momentarily and look into another location.

We next looked into a huge bucket list location for both of us – New Zealand and Australia. This is a destination both of us have wanted to go here for a long time and we both want to spend a good amount of time there when we do go. We looked into going with Gate1 Travel again, but the spring dates they had available did not work with our schedules and they do not have dates posted beyond Spring 2018 at the time. Since this trip is a little pricier we wanted to have a little longer to save for this trip. We have decided to push this trip to Spring 2019, this will give use enough time to save and plan properly for such a big bucket list item.

Next we circled backed to a locale we have discussed in the past but have passed on for different trips. Italy is a place my friend has been to before but I have not. Because of this we look to go someplace she hasn’t been to and somewhere I would like to go. First we looked into Cinque Terre. We ruled this out since the weather in April (when we decided to have a get away) so we looked south to Sicily. This is somewhere I definitely would like to go. My family heritage goes back to Sicily; my great-grandmother was born and lived there before moving to the United States. We were able to find reasonable flight times (travel times of 12 hours feels like nothing after South Africa) at a price that we were comfortable paying. We decided to do 9 days since we leave late Friday afternoon and arrived on Saturday morning. This way we have full day almost the day we arrive.

We are flying into Catania and have decided that this will be our home base during our stay. We figured if we really want to move to another city during our stay we could always change hotels. Now we just need to find a hotel to in Catania and what tours we would like to book. Guess a trip to Barnes and Nobles is in order to pick up a trusty travel book. Too bad my favorite Rick Steves doesn’t have a book for Sicily!

Any tips and suggestions are welcomed!