Saturday, September 27, 2025

Whither Come June?

Jay and I have been travelling during winters since we retired early in the autumn of 2014. As I've said in this space, at least a thousand times, we go somewhere warm and sunny. In doing so, we've covered a whole lot of ground. Yet more recently, we found that meant we were constantly missing out on most of Europe. We devised an annual plan to start taking the entire month of June to try and fix that sad realization. 

For only the last three years we've been doing Junes. 

In 2023, we rented an Airbnb in Nice, France and a finally explored the Côte d'Azur. It was delightful and rewarding. Twelve months later, more ambitiously, we explored some of northeastern Europe. We flew into Berlin and took trains and busses seeing the whole of Poland, and some of Lithuania, returning from Latvia.  As a follow up in southeastern Europe, just four months ago, we flew into Venice, Italy and made our way through Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria, to fly back from Belgrade, Romania.

During our lifetime, we'd experienced a taste of much of western Europe and bits of central and northern Europe on trips and cruises.  It wasn't until our sixth decade of life and fourth as a team that we've finally got somewhat of a handle on the remainder.

Our pre-trip planning is always meticulous and generally starts months in advance.  We do it all ourselves and that takes time and lots of research.  Therefore, Jay and I have already started talking about June 2027.  We have already discussed possibilities of spending next June:
  • re-exploring fascinating Morocco as our time there was brief and its mountains and seaside hold so much to see and do.  
  • spending additional time on the eastern side of the Adriatic and perhaps going up to explore Bosnia and Herzegovina.
  • heading to the Caucasus. We've talked about Georgia and Azerbaijan for a few years now but have a friend who's flying back from Tbilisi in a few days!
     Google Maps

However, if I stare for just a few minutes at this image cut from Google Maps, all sorts of other itineraries seem to pop off this screen into my head.  Where to next?


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