We have been focusing on getting the first week of the trip locked down because that’s the leg that my parents will be joining us on before they head off to Barcelona and we head off to Valencia (after spending an extra day in Sevilla). Now that we’ve finished booking hotels for that part of the trip, we can start to concentrate on the rest.

As I mentioned, I had a lot of trouble coming up with a workable itinerary because Spain is so big and the train system isn’t quite as extensive or fast as it has been in some of the other countries we’ve visited. What finally enabled me to come up with a plan was using the cheap flights offered by Vueling to mke a few of the larger hops between cities more doable and time efficient.

We’re a little over two months out, and at this point I’m getting pretty excited about the whole thing. I even bought a new lens for the trip. One with a wide range so I could wouldn’t have to be swapping out lenses on the fly. Between that and my Lensbaby I should be all set.

We thought we’d been tricked. After studying the leaves and vines carved around the west door of Salamanca’s New Cathedral for 10 minutes, we still couldn’t locate the astronaut, the monkey with an ice cream cone or the stork carrying a branch in its beak. We decided that the purported carvings were urban legends, most likely concocted as a joke on gullible tourists.

Gargoyles are some of my favorite things to photograph, so you can bet I’ll be looking for these when we are in Salamanca in a few months.

The distance between some places makes some travel times prohibitive. I’ve all ready had to make the decision that Santiago de Compostela is just to far away to logically fit in. That does frees up a couple of days for other places though.

Also, my parents are meeting us there for the first week or so, which means I have to coordinate with their schedules as well.

I have never had this much trouble trying to map out a route before. If anybody has any suggestions, please feel free to pass them along.

I really can’t think why we have been there yet, it’s only a two and a half hour drive from Seattle.

I’ll hopefully be posting from the road, so check back often to see where we are and read about our trip.

In more immediate plans, we head out for Tulum in just under two weeks. We will be there for 5 days and then will be in Merida for 3. Very much looking forward to this trip and will post photos when we get back.

In Merida we will be staying at the charming looking Luz en Yucatan, we’ll see if it lives up to it’s web site. I will let you know that as well.

To that end I’ve started reading the Moon Handbooks Yucatan Peninsula and marking things of interest.

Because we are going down for a wedding we will be spending the first majority of the trip in Tulum and surrounds, but the last three days will be ours to do with as we wish. And that’s the part that needs the planning.

And we are ready. Plans are all made, hotels are all booked, the car is rented and the train tickets are bought.

That is all.

Planing for San Francisco has been pretty minimal as it’s an entirely different sort of journey than the one we’ll be taking in May. This trip is all about visiting friends and family, relaxing and probably an excursion to Napa and Sonoma with a possible overnight stay in Calistoga. But really there isn’t much required in the way of pre-trip planning apart from the rental car and a few emails and phone calls to people to let them know we’re coming. And since I’ve put Irene in charge of finding us a place to stay in the wine country, my work is done.

Which is good, because most of my attention has been focused on France. And now with two months until we leave, the planning is winding down as the itinerary is fixed, the apartment in Paris and the car for Provence have both been rented, and hotels have been booked for Avignon and Vaison-la-Romaine. It remains only to book hotels for Nice and the Luberon (and I’m in the process of doing that) and to contact the apartment people and arrange the details of our arrival.

One thing that pleases me about this trip is that even though we will be packing a lot in, we won’t be switching hotel as often as we might. We will have a minimum of two nights at two hotels and three and four nights at the others. This allows us to feel like we have a little bit of a base from which to explore the area. The logistics were tricky at first, but I feel like of got everything pretty solidly nailed down.

I really do enjoy the whole planning process and lately I’ve been listening to the A Year In Europe podcast and dreaming about what it would be like to drop out of life for a year and spend it traveling. And although it doesn’t seem feasible right now, some day I would love to do it. Although I think I would probably broaden the scope a bit and make it more of a round the world trip.

For now though, I’ll just have to settle for the two or three weeks at a time we can manage.

So when Moleskine announced their new City Notebooks I was very intrigued and excited. Now, after months of trying, I finally managed to get my hands on the one for Paris. They are not quite yet in wide distribution and the two places in town that have them were always out of the Paris edition. I eventually had to order it through Powell’s.

If you haven’t seen these yet their a brilliant little package. Included are maps of the city, street indexes, metro maps, blank pages for notes, and tabbed sections for restaurants, bars, shops, people, and various blank tabs for your own interests. One of the best bits, though, is the transparent sticky sheets that fit on the map pages so you can trace your routes or mark place of interest. I have all ready transferred all the things I marked on my Wayfaring map to my notebook maps and have also filled it with my own spots to check out.

Moleskine also has versions coming out for U.S. cities and I’m sure I’ll pick up the New York book, and maybe the San Francisco one as well. Hell, I might even get the Seattle one just for kicks.

I wouldn’t mind seeing some more general country books as we rarely only visit one city on a trip.