Merry Christmas … Happy Holidays
Wishing all a happy, healthy, and enriching 2018 shared with loved ones.
A mere five weeks after returning home from our 180-day RTW voyage, the time has again come to lace up our travel shoes and head overseas. In fact, even as I write this post, we’re at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas, awaiting our flight to London.
Every year we make a pilgrimage to visit family in Turkey for a month or two. As we’re wont to do, we’ve tacked on some additional travel adventures to our trip, stretching out our time away from home … this time to 100+ days. Combine those days with the RTW and by the time we return to the USA in November, we will have been out of the country for 286 days this year. That’s a lot of days … even by our standards.
Our three cruises are all on Celebrity. Sightseeing plans for the
cruises are in the works. What we will do while in Turkey … that is still TBD.
[Base map courtesy of the Celebrity Cruises website.]
All this is neither here nor there where this blog is concerned. Except that going a-travelin’ will impact my ability to process photos and put up more posts in this already-behind-the-times blog. I am not abandoning the blog entirely, however. I will continue to work on it in bits and pieces where and when time permits. So take heart … keep that email subscription going or stop by every once I while to check on my progress.
© 2015-2017 — All rights reserved by Erin Erkun.
Friends often ask if there’s anywhere left in this big wide world of ours that we have not been to. The short answer — plenty!
I have a general idea of the places we’ve traveled to, but I haven’t tracked them per se. It got me thinking. The continents are easy. The number is finite and I can easily say that we’ve set foot on all seven of them.
Countries? Well, that’s another matter. For one thing, there are different ‘country lists’ based on various criteria. I decided to use one of the online mapping sites to get a quick map of the countries we’ve visited … together. Mui’s number would be a little higher as he has been on assignment to places like Saudi Arabia and Kosovo … to mention a few.
The map below proves my point. We’ve been to 90 out of 250 countries thus far … that’s just 36% of the countries of the world. The map is misleading, of course. The online tool marks the entire country even if we've been to just a city or two. Nonetheless, it's a decent visual of the countries we've set foot in … were I so inclined to notch them on our travel belt ;-)
We’ve got a long, long ways to go before we make a real dent in the world it seems! I’d better go see about planning some more trips ;-)
© 2004-2018 All rights reserved by Erin Erkun.
All four bags were delivered today … a day earlier than the Luggage Free/FedEx tracker showed. In fact, Mui happened to be leaving the RV resort to take care of some errands when he saw the FedEx driver unloading the bags in front of the campground office. He asked nicely and the driver put them right into the CR-V. That was at 1:33p. Three hours later … the bags were unpacked and everything was put away.
I am dead tired, but relieved that this last post-RTW chore is done. It sort of puts a period at the end of what felt like an incomplete sentence until now.
© 2004-2018 All rights reserved by Erin Erkun.
I just had a déjà vu moment. Mui’s sleeping in the bedroom. He must have turned over in the bed as the motorhome swayed a bit. For a second I thought I was back on Insignia. Alas, no. We are no longer on the ship … we are at our ‘condo on wheels’ … adjusting to being on land. I used to get a case of ‘dock rock’ after returning from a voyage. Two days on land now, and I don’t even have that as a reminder of having been at sea for a while. Perhaps the frequency of our ports of call on this last segment did the trick to eliminate it.
