Hello! Has it really been……almost six months since my last post?? Yes, I see that it has! Did I miss anything while I was gone? Oh…a pandemic, you say? Quarantines around the world and travel difficult at best? Well, that doesn’t sound ideal for a travel blog!

In all seriousness, the last several months have been quite the rollercoaster, haven’t they? It’s hard to believe that nearly six months have passed since I (like many other people) starting working from home full-time, wearing a mask, and doing what I can to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It’s also been nearly seven months since I last traveled anywhere. We’ve cancelled two trips since all this started – a spring break trip to the Gulf Coast in Orange Beach, AL (the same trip we’ve made in years past, most recently in 2019) and a UK trip that should have happened only a month ago (cancelling that was a real bummer because we were going to attend Brighton Pride, headlined by the always-fabulous Mariah Carey, with some of my UK friends, followed by a few days in London). And now, it’s nearly Labor Day and we don’t have any trips on the books to even look forward to! I know some people have started traveling again and, to be fair, we are starting to think about an NYC trip in December (we’ve been there around the Christmas season a few times, most recently in 2018), but with so many international travel restrictions on US passport-holders right now, it’s not practical to plan any big trips. Depressing, right? But it’s important that we all continue to do what we can, including not traveling. Sooner or later, this will pass and people like us will be ready to hit the road again. Hang in there!

Facebook reminded me today that this time of year is VERY popular for Scott and I to go traveling, so I thought it would be fun to share links to posts from all the trips in my Facebook memories today. If I can’t travel for real, I may as well travel through my memories, right? Join me down memory lane!

• 2013 – this was the start of a three-week trip that took us through Amsterdam, Bruges, Paris, Madrid, Florence, and London, not to mention a few side trips to places like Toledo, Cinque Terre, and Stonehenge (the featured photo in this post is from the fabulous, if a little rainy, afternoon we spent in Cinque Terre). This was the first trip Scott and I took together and it was so much fun! All the locations were new to him and all but Paris and London were new to me (and to be fair, I’d only been to Paris once, for a day-long day trip from London, so it was largely new for me as well). Lots of amazing memories made!
• 2014 – this was the start of another long trip (2.5 weeks, if I remember correctly), this time hitting cities that were totally new to both of us, including Budapest, Berlin, Prague, Munich, and Zurich. I think we only took one day trip, but it was a really fun one to see Linderhof Palace and Neuschwanstein Castle.
• 2017 – this was actually the end of a trip, rather than the beginning. After four years, Scott decided he would make a return trip to London and this day in history marked our last day of that week-long trip. Although he’d seen London before (and regular readers will know how much I love to visit my favorite city), he also got to experience two fun new-to-him cities on our day trips to Brighton and Cambridge (the latter being new-to-me as well). I remember the weather being especially nice on this trip, which is always a nice bonus when traveling, particularly in the UK.
• 2019 – how was this only last year?! This marked the beginning of our two-week romp through the UK and Ireland, with stops in Edinburgh, Belfast, Galway, and Dublin, with some excellent sidesteps to St Andrews, Giant’s Causeway, and the Cliffs of Moher. This was such a fun trip! We made more awesome memories and checked some wonderful cities off our lists.

Wow, what fun it was to revisit these trips! Hope you enjoyed it, too. Or if nothing else, I hope you saw the progression of my writing and photography skills over the years 🙂 When I think back on trips like these, I realize how fortunate I’ve been to see so many great destinations and also how much I miss traveling. I know I’m not alone in that though. Where are you most looking forward to visiting when we’re all able to travel easily again? Do you already have a trip(s) on the books? Or maybe you’ve already started traveling again? Leave a comment and let me know!

Until normality reasserts itself, I plan to resume my Travel Throwback posts as I still have more pre-blog trips to write about. I certainly have the time to write about them now. 🙂 Look for the next one soon!