Our Family Sabbatical

 

Here’s where we’re going on our family sabbatical

Choosing destinations for our sabbatical has been tough!  Even with a full 14 months to work with, there are far more places that we’d like to visit than we can fit into our schedule.  Ideally we will spend a week at a time at each stopping point so that we’re not moving every couple of days, but that won’t always be possible.

At this point our itinerary is not fully developed, especially the parts of the trip that are further out.  We aren’t planning to stick to a strict schedule so that we can linger in places that we enjoy the most and move on more quickly from places that we don’t enjoy.

That said, here’s our rough itinerary:

Part 1 – Grand European Road Trip

Our family loves a good road trip, so for most of the European leg of our journey we plan to pick up a long term lease car from Renault using their Eurodrive program (we’ll cover that in a future post).  With the car we’ll be able to reach far flung places in Europe.  We’re planning a loop of central and eastern Europe, traveling as fart north as Norway before heading back south through the Baltics and Eastern Europe on to Greece.  We’ll spend some time in Italy before starting the next phase of our trip.

June – Southern Germany / UK

July – UK from Dover to Orkney, then the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway

August – Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania

September – Poland, Czech Republic,  Croatia

October – Croatia, Romania, Serbia

November – Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece (including the Athen’s Marathon!)

December – Croatia, Slovenia, Italy

Part 2 – Central and South America

We have not traveled extensively in Central or South America so we’re looking forward to spending some time there, learning Spanish, spending time with extended family in Belize, and experiencing the wonders of South America (Patagonia has been on our to-do list for a long time!).

January – Costa Rica, Belize

February – Argentina

March – Chile

Part 3 – Australasia & Asia

We’re planning road trips in New Zealand and Australia, where we’re toying with the idea of renting or buying an RV or campervan.  In Asia we’re planning to revisit some of the places that we traveled to while we lived in Hong Kong (before we had kids!).

April – New Zealand

May – Australia (we hope to rent or buy an RV for our time in Australia)

June – Hong Kong, Thailand

July – Cambodia, Vietnam

 

Give us your feedback!

Know of a killer destination or can’t-miss activity in the countries that we’ll be visiting?  Let us know by commenting below!