Planning is (more than?) half the pleasure

Although we still have to do our first trip of this year, we have planned (nearly) everthing already. For this year, the trips will go to Dublin, London (twice, mainly to see a show on Saturday night), Venice, Stockholm and Visby (on the Gotland isle) and Budapest.

But as weeks go by, we got the itch to plan for 2017 already. And don't you agree, planning can give you so much pleasure! You look up things, like hotels where you could stay + their evalution of Tripadvisor and Booking.com, finding restaurants where you could eat, how the climate is when you are travelling, what the difference in time is (when necessary), which travel documents you need to have, which shots you need to take to protect you from illness...

What we are looking at right now are which trips we can do next year. We'd love to go to Buenos Aires (Argentina), because it has a certain appeal. We've seen Evita, of course, and would love to see the place for ourselves. Also, it would be fun to be able to tango and go horseback riding at some estancia. We've been looking at hotels already and appear to have found a great one.

At the same time, we have been checking out Toronto. This could become a trip in 2018. We've been in Canada  before (seen the Rockies: stayed in Banff and Fernie, went to Vancouver and did more skiing in Québec province), but have never been to Toronto. From there, we would also like to go and see the Niagara Falls.

And most likely - if nothing untoward happens - we could to to Cape Town in South Africa later on that year. Language won't  be a problem there, as lots of South Africans speak 'Afrikaans' which originates from our Dutch. And we know English, of course! Willl have to taste the wine there!

Also, returning to 2017, we might do a trip to the Azores (a group of islands, belonging to Portugal, in the Atlantic). It's quite authentic there. Not so long ago, I talked with a Portugese woman who teaches French, and she told me she has family living in the Azores and it's very nice there. Also we could do a city trip either to Prague or Krakow in Poland. We'll see how that goes.

And from experience, I know that anything can come up (like some artist who's doing a show somehwere in Great-Britain or Dublin - places easy to reach and not all that expensive if you plan carefullu (and save points in all major programs of air, train and hotels). Like this spring. We'll be going to London and it costs almost nothing.  We could buy the tickets for Eurostar well ahead and the hotel is for free (saved up enough Hhonor points to even stay in a suite!). Only have to pay for the show and the food we'll be enjoying.