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