Hello again
I thought I'd write throw a few thoughts down as it's a pretty dull Sunday and I've not done much today anyway.
For my plans I have wanted to keep things fairly flexible, because I never know who I will bump into along the way and I want to generally play things by ear. I'm also a bit of a last-minuter when it comes to organising myself, so this approach suits me down to the ground.
I have been giving a lot of thought to where I might start my trip and I'd more or less settled on a 3 month 'breaking in' trip. For this I've been thinking of starting off in quite 'easy' countries such as France and Spain, where it would be easy to adjust. I've also liked the idea of going to Portugal, as it does look beautiful from the pictures I've seen. (See Porto at the top of this post)
Now I'm thinking 3 months may be a bit of a long time for just 3 countries, and my money wouldn't last as long as if I spread out a bit more. I've also taken onboard a point of my friend's. He said that it would make more sense to try and go to the more challenging countries while I'm young, as it would be more difficult later on when I have more commitments. I'm not intending on getting on a plane to Afghanistan anytime soon, but I'd definitely like to go to places like Turkey and India to name but a couple.
So now I'm plotting a vague itinerary as follows:
- get a Eurostar ticket from Sheffield directly (2 changes) to Paris and spend, at most, 2 or 3 nights there and maybe a week or two in total in France (looking at my book it's approx. 4hours from Paris to Bordeaux)
- head to Spain and travel more or less to Porto (need to find out more about where to go in Spain!) and then down to Lisbon.
- from Lisbon head via Seville to Malaga to see some of Andalucia
- visit the Alhambra
- up to Barcelona
Obviously I need to do quite a bit more planning (such as where to go in Portugal!) but this is just the very basic route I want to start out on.
