Diary: Trips planned for the next six months

It’s quite funny, recently I published a blog in which I looked back on the months November and December. Immediately several people asked me: “But looking forward, what kind of trips have you planned out for 2019?”. To be honest, we are far from finished planning our trips for this year, however, for the first 6 months of the year, we already have a lot of nice things in prospect. In this blog, I will tell you more about these trips!

In recent weeks we have been busy arranging flights, booking ho(s)tels and planning routes. After January, a quiet month in which we will stay in the Netherlands, we have planned some trips I really look forward to:

February: a weekend get-away to Naples

Nice, this blog will be published after the 26th of January (which is the birthday of my (little) brother Maurits). Therefore it’s safe to write this down: As a surprise for his birthday, I will take my little brother on a weekend get-away to Naples. He will be turning 18 and is therefor nine years younger than me, however, he is at least ten or eleven centimetres taller than me. Ever since he was eleven and gave a speech at school about Pompeii, it has been a big dream of him to go to Naples to visit Pompeii. And so, for his 18th birthday, I will take him to this beautiful city to visit Pompeii, eat Italian and of course drink his first legal glasses of wine.

I went to Naples a few years ago with Ries. Do you have any tips for Naples? Or do you want me to specifically write something about Naples or Pompei? Let me know via a comment!

March: a wedding in Paris and snow in Lapland

I look so much forward to March! We will start the month in Paris for the big wedding of Lester and Jeremy. Not only is Paris the city of romance, but it is also the city of the Seine: and that’s exactly where the wedding will take place, on a cruise over this river! With the Eiffel Tower in the background, this will be an amazing location for a wedding and a great party!

Immediately after Paris, we will continue to the next highlight. Together with our friends Thomas and Christine we will fly to Lapland. Finnish Lapland to be exact. We will fly on Ivalo from which we will pick up a car and drive to Inari. Here we will stay for two days in which we will go husky riding and make a snowmobile ride. Then we will continue to the town of Kaamanen where we will spend two nights in an amazing lodge and we will try to see the northern lights (Aurora) by night! This place has been on my travel bucket list for so long, it’s going to be wonderful!

April: a road trip through Scotland

Yes, we’re going back to Scotland! After I fell madly in love with this place last December, we decided to go back this April. This time we will be going for 10 days and we will go camping and make a Roadtrip. We planned to start for two days in Edinburgh, after which we will pick up a campervan at the company Spaceships. I love to be able to drive everywhere, see whether we like a place and if so, to spent the night while camping out! This flexibility is something I have really missed since our last camping-trip trough New Zealand. In New Zealand, we also drove in a campervan from Spaceships and we liked this company a lot!

This time it is the intention to visit some less touristy places in Scotland, we are really looking for ‘the hidden gems of Scotland’! A blog about this will follow of course. Do you have must-see’s here? Let me know!

May: a wedding in the Ardennes (Belgium)

Yes, Paris is not the only wedding we attend this spring. Our dear friends Thomas and Christine, with whom we will also go to Lapland and with whom we have visited the Champagne region last year, are getting married! Ries is their best man and it is going to be a big party! We have already visited the location and it is a really nice place. A whole weekend long in a beautiful big house in the Belgian Ardennes with nice people, great food and lots of fun! We are excited!

June: Madagascar

And another one from my bucket list: we are going to Madagascar! Madagascar is a large African island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Because of the highly diversified landscapes and climates people also call it the eighth continent. The country is super varied: from tropical rainforests to vast savannah and from high mountains to beautiful white beaches. In addition, over 90% of the animals and plant species that live on Madagascar, can be found nowhere else in the world. I am really excited that we will be visiting this place!

We will start off with a road trip to the north of the island, then we plan to see more of the south. We will also visit the tropical island of Ile Sainte-Marie, an old pirate island. This is where (hopefully) one of Ries’s big dreams will come true: seeing humpback whales from very close by. In the period from June to August, these animals mate in this environment. With a bit of luck, you can see them from up close.

We are also busy planning for the second half of 2019 … there are probably going to happen some very cool things, but more about that later on! And now I’m curious! What are your travel plans? If you have tips about one of the above countries, please let me know!

Love,
Charlotte