Trip Planning Can Be Messy - April 2015

Over the weekend of April 11-12, Debbie worked on fine-tuning the driving distances and the sites we planned to see.  Through e-mails, texts and phone calls, it was unanimously decided to add an additional half day to Milan in order to see everything on our list.  This required tweaking our time in Provence and eliminating Arles.  We all agreed this was a good idea.  The hotel booking trip was set for the last week in July.  Lisa will fly to Dallas and the final plans will be made for the trip.  It is all coming together.

Messy-Messy-Messy

5th Planning Session - March 2015

The weekend of March 20-22, Tom and Lisa flew down to Dallas to fine-tune the trip and to attend the Dallas Opera's performance of La Boheme.  We worked all day Friday on the distances to drive each day and the sites to see along the way.  There were quite a few more Rhone Valley wines sampled.  On Saturday more research was done on the Rhone Valley.  There are a lot of wineries and good wines to choose.  Tom has been given the assignment to research which wineries to stop for tastings.  We know he is up to the task.  As we had some extra time, Lisa and Debbie researched and booked the hotel for our first night in Milan.  It is in a perfect location for walking to all the sites we want to see.  We were very happy with our find.  We will set up a time in July to book the rest of the hotels.  The trip is really coming together now and promises to be another trip of a lifetime.

Tom and Deb hard at work

Bill and Lucky hard at work

Final driving map

Still a lot of red arrows?

Map of the Rhone Valley

A wonderful dinner before the opera at the Old Warsaw

4th Planning Session - New Years 2014

It is one year later and we are still planning.  Tom and Lisa drove down to Dallas to celebrate the New Year and work on the trip.  Thanks to all Debbie's research, we had a much better idea of what to see and do in the cities we planned to visit.  Bill had booked our plane reservations in November, so all was set to fly in and out of Milan.  We managed to taste test quite a few wines from the Rhone Valley hoping this would give us an idea of some wineries to visit.  This will be a tough decision as they were all good.  

We had a wonderful dinner at Mignon

Still way to many red arrows - need to eliminate

Lots of research

3rd Planning Session - September 2014

Lisa flew down to Dallas to do some trip planning and have a decorating consultation for the remodel of the living room and dining room.  We knew we had to eliminate some destinations from our list and we had decided to forgo Cinque Terre.  But after some serious discussions and mapping, we kept Cinque Terre on the list and decided to eliminate Switzerland entirely.  We would save this country for another trip.  Now it was time to start digging into specific  sites we wanted to see at each destination.  

2nd Planning Session - July 2014

Bill and Debbie came to St. Louis to celebrate Fran's birthday on July 4th.  While they were in town for the family festivities, we managed to squeeze in some trip planning time. We debated adding Pisa to the itinerary.  Debbie and Bill had been there 30 years ago, but Lisa and Tom had never been there.  It was a little out of the way, but decided it was this trip or never.  At this point our destinations were Milan, Parma, Pisa, Cinque Terre, Genoa, Monaco, Nice, Cannes, Frejus, Les Baux, Arles, Nimes, Pont du Gard, Avignon, Valence, Lyon, Geneva, Zurich, and Lucerne.  We even considered Marseilles, but after looking a little closer at pictures on the internet, we quickly took that off our list.  We knew this was way too many destinations, so now was the time to research and eliminate.  

Dinner at Bishop's Post

1st Planning Session - December 2013

New Years Eve dinner at LaRusso's

Working hard or hardly working?

Bill and Debbie came to St. Louis to ring in the New Year and start planning our 2015 European Adventure.  As usual, our first question was "where do you want to go?"  A number of destinations were discussed over many bottles of wine.  On our last trip, we had to change planes in Berlin to get to Vienna.  We all decided to try to eliminate that extra step if possible, so we looked at destinations near airports with direct flights from the United States.  We narrowed our choices down to Madrid or Milan and settled on flying into Milan.  Where to go from there?  The possibilities were many and varied.  After taking into consideration sites from previous trips and sites we still wanted to see, we decided to head south from Milan to the Italian Riviera, then west to the French Riviera and Provence area, then north through the Rhone Valley and on to Switzerland before heading back to Milan.  We knew this was going to be another very ambitious plan, but it gave us a good place to start researching and whittling the trip down to more manageable proportions. 

Map of our previous trips and proposed sites for 2015 trip