Flying High...

This year have been somewhat of a rollercoaster for our family...last November Mike was asked to consider a position in Singapore within the company he works for. Mike served his mission in Singapore so he was excited to say the least. I had to do some hard core research first before I began to feel comfortable with it...since we had a son starting school in February...there was more to consider than usual. Singapore is an extremely expensive place to live especially when having to send your kids to intertnational schools and since Mike's company usually only does permanent moves - nothing would be financed by the company...so after waiting 7-8 months they finally gave us the financial package....which we promptly declined. I was somewhat surprised at myself to say the least...because after all the waiting and preparing and effort I put into research etc to do with moving...I thought that I should have at least felt like SCREAMING! (This isn't the first time this has happened to us!) But funnily enough both Mike and I just shrugged our shoulders and were like...whatever!...haaa there were no tantrums, PMS or screaming....in fact there has been no emotional display whatsoever...we were just happy to get on with our daily lives - where ever that was going to be!

Because of not knowing what we were doing we hadn't been able to actually plan a holiday so far this year...we have HEAPS of frequent flyers so we had been tossing up different holidays....should we take a trip to the snow (NZ), Fiji, the U.S???? but we were always undecided...within 2 weeks of us declining the offer to go to Singapore we FINALLY booked our holiday!!! So now we are showing alot of emotion....we're sooooo excited!!

I'm also feeling some anxiety to do this trip since we had to leave the kids behind...for 3 WHOLE WEEKS! I've never been away from both of them at the same time for more than 2 nights! But I'm not going to think about that for now!

So this is what we'll be doing and seeing during the month of OCTOBER!

First Stop

PARIS, France

Second Stop

Cairo, Egypt

Third Stop

Italy

Fourth Stop

New York

Fifth Stop

Chicago - the windy city!

Now it took us 3 days of hard core negotiating with each other to actually decide where we were going to go...I was willing to spend only 2 days in the States and the rest in Europe as both Mike and I have both lived in the States before...BUT Mike would have none of it...he wanted to spend practically half the time there...

In highschool more than half of my allotted units were History units...especially Ancient History - if I had gone to uni back then it would have been to become an history teacher...I LOVED ancient history...it just fascinated me. So of course when trying to plan this trip I was wanting to go to ALLLL the places that I had studied in highschool...Mike on the other hand didn't seem too interested in those places - he wanted to reminisce and go back to the places he grew up in...Germany, France, Switzerland....he wanted familiarity...he wanted 4-5 star accommodation, I wanted to Backpack through Europe....so the places I wanted to go were places like Egypt, Athens and the Greek Islands, Turkey, Middle East, Rome, Prague etc....of course the list went on....I figured since he kept the America leg - I could choose the Europe/Middle East leg...haaaaa I'm constantly amazed at his talents in the area of 'persuasion'!! The boy is gooood!

All in all it ended coming down to what flights were available and how much time we had...and Mike has promised me that in the next few years he will take me to Athens and the Greek islands since that was the one that I had the hardest time giving up!