So many of you have asked where we are going. I’ll tell you what I know so far!

We start our travels with a brief stop in Portland, where we will meet up with my (Katie’s) parents for a few days. I convinced my mom to join me in attending the Intentional Motherhood Retreat hosted by Intentional Parents, my favorite parenting ministry.

From Portland, we take a surprisingly short flight to Iceland. We spend a week there before heading to Copenhagen. Next comes a brief stop in Bologna, Italy, before a month in Albania. We are volunteering for 2 weeks in Lezhe, Albania, and then touring the country for a bit. We make a short stop in Milan, Italy, before getting to Bruges area in Belgium for Christmas. My parents and my youngest sister and her husband will spend Christmas with us there. We fly to southern Portugal with my parents in late December. After exploring for a week with them, we will have about another six weeks of time before a visa is required. We’re fascinated by everything we’ve seen in Portugal and might spend that whole time there, or we might venture into Spain a bit, too. I studied abroad in Spain for six months and would love to enjoy some of that delicious food again! We have tried to arrange some Workaway volunteering in Spain and Portugal but don’t know if that will pan out. It has been difficult to find volunteering that we can all participate in!

Around the middle of February we will fly to the UK and spend the remainder of our trip in the UK and Ireland. We fly home at the end of March.

If you have any valuable intel to share on what we must see and do in Portugal, the UK, or Ireland, we’d love to hear from you!

Why so many places? We are asking ourselves that, too. We originally envisioned one place per month, which sounds much more reasonable considering the logistics to haul our crew around and the time it takes to research suitable lodging. But once we started dreaming and researching, we struggled in limiting ourselves. This is a constant problem for us. Even when we’ve purposed to rein in our wanderlust, it’s so hard to cross off places we’d like to see. Also, getting around in Europe is much cheaper and easier than in the US. We can book a flight for six of us from one country to another in Europe for less than it would cost for one of us to fly and visit family in the US. Public transit makes it relatively easy to get around, although we will rent a car a few times too.

We are down to five days and counting! Time to keep plugging away at that to-do list!