A few weeks ago, I bought two tickets for us to fly to Frankfurt, Germany. Over the intervening weeks, a very detailed itinerary for a trip within our trip has taken shape. As anyone who knows us knows, we have family in the Frankfurt area, and we’ll be spending part of our time in Germany with them, but we’ll also be heading into a big adventure that sees us visiting Sweden and Norway for the first time. Denmark will be a part of this, but I didn’t list it as a first because we dipped a toe into the southern end of the country some years ago.
I’m reluctant to share any more as the details of the trip will be divulged after our return but this kind of journey requires an incredible amount of work, relatively. Planning for vacation hardly seems like work when what is really being done is the creation of a timeline that is intended to see us out playing for the duration of time away from Arizona.
Mapping a course through three countries and a dozen cities over 18 days has already required between 100 and 130 hours, with another 20 to 30 yet to come. The reason for the lengthy planning is to establish a number of touchpoints/options during the course of our journey. With a desire to move by foot, water, bike, and rail into the forest, water, city, museum, mountain, and history, we have many facets of approach mapped out before we land somewhere in order to not lose a moment figuring things out while we are in the midst of traveling. Preplanning is key to maximizing our travel investment. Other than reservations, nothing needs to be adhered to if the circumstances of the moment demand that we alter our plans, so there is flexibility. This idea of flexibility/spontaneity is really only addressed due to the many questions we get about being able to find time for spur-of-the-moment stuff to do on our adventures. I believe this only comes up because the majority of people don’t have this kind of time to spend planning a vacation, and so may suffer the dilemma of finding what they will do once they hit the ground at their destination.
The places of note that are on our itinerary include Roskilde and Copenhagen, Denmark. Next up are Malmo, Ystad, Lund, Gothenburg, Uppsala, and Stockholm, Sweden. From there, we move on to Oslo, Flåm, Gudvangen, and Bergen in Norway before flying back to Frankfurt, Germany, for more family time. None of this will be traveled by car, while the majority will be by train. Though I’d enjoy the flexibility of coming and going as we please, meaning we’d be doing a lot more driving, my absolute lack of joy in trying to park in big European cities means I’m willing to sacrifice some broader spontaneity for my mental health. I could imagine someone reading that we’ll be in a dozen cities over the course of 18 days as already questioning the mental health equation, but that’s the way we travel. With over 440 waking hours to wander through 4 countries, our mode of operation dictates that we should stuff our days full of experiences that tax our ability to keep up with ourselves.
In our world, vacation is not a time of recuperation in the traditional sense of how many Americans travel, we are spending hard-earned treasure to gather experiences that will continue moving with us for years to come. In a sense, exploration is a method of putting money in the bank for our experiential retirement savings, as who knows what happens in our later years and if we are able to push ourselves like we can during this stage of our lives. And from my perspective, we must consider the environment and overtourism where we may not be allowed to visit some of the places we’ll be dipping into in the next weeks.
From the realm of absurd and meaningless statistics, this will be our 328th trip away from Phoenix since September 1999, meaning we’ve averaged nearly 14 getaways per year since that time. I’ll likely be shooting between 12,000 and 16,000 photos while on this grand adventure, depending on the weather, and between 1,000 and 1,300 of those will be published to around 78,000 to 140,000 words across the 26 days of blog entries. Our vacation will last a total of 624 hours and will ultimately be documented with approximately 109,000 words and 1,150 photos, requiring about 95 hours of image prep and another 30 days of transcribing and writing the text, thus bringing me to nearly 12 weeks in total between planning and the last post being shared before this period of immersion comes to an end. And for this luxury of time afforded me, we’ll have a document that will allow us many years of exploring, in fine detail, our first Scandinavia-centric vacation.