Here we are once again, just two days away from taking off on a 75 day adventure. It’s been just over six months since my pancreas and gall bladder called a halt to our planned life on the road, but now our new home base is settled enough that we can set out on another long journey.
Our main goal on this trip was a to spend some time in the UK and Ireland, since Rita’s roots are in Ireland and as near as I can tell, my genes come from southwestern England and Wales (with a bit of Neanderthal – ’23 and Me’ tells me I have more Neanderthal genes than 98% of humans).
But we were anxious to get started, and England is still a bit cold, so we are starting out in Portugal and Spain. This was helped out by the massive amount of points we had accumulated on two of our credit cards as we setup our home. We were able to book our flights from Knoxville to Lisbon for the grand total of absolutely free.
The first part of the trip will be the most grueling. We’ll leave our home about 4pm for a 7pm flight to Dulles, and wait a few hours to board an overnight flight to Lisbon. Once we arrive, we have a couple of hours to get to the bus station to catch our Flixbus to Lagos, on the southern coastal region of Portugal known as the Algarve.
Near as I can figure, by the time we get to our AirBnB in Lagos it will be about 5:30pm local time, or about 29 hours after we started our trek. Hopefully we can nap a little on the overnight and on the bus, but I imagine we will have just enough energy to find a meal and shop for some breakfast supplies before collapsing.
It’s a fairly ambitious trip, mixing some tricks we have learned traveling with some new things we’ll be trying.
Our original plan was to visit a few cities of the Algarve, then head to Lisbon, maybe Porto, and on to London. Two things changed our plans. First, I noticed on a map how close Seville in Spain is to the Portugeuse border. Second, I was invited to speak at an International Living conference being held in Albufeira in early April.
Being flexible is what roving retirement is all about, so we adjusted. After a few days in Lagos, we are back on a bus and heading east to Seville for about a week. While we are there, we may rent a car for a day to explore some of the nearby villages.
Then back into Portugal for the conference in Albufeira. Rita and I will have a table in the Exhibition Hall to talk about roving and our podcast, and I have the death-defying task of giving a talk in the Main Hall one day.
We found flights from Porto to London were a bit expensive, so we traded Porto for Seville, and will just stay in Lisbon for a few days. We’re in London for about five days, where we will walk and use public transport to explore the city. No firm plans, other than a few places like the British Museum and some sites we would like to see.
Next up is a train to Oxford, where we will spend two nights before picking up a rental car. This is one of our new twists. We will have the car for a week, and have vague plans of driving to Wales and then around southwest England, circling back to Oxford, but we only have reservations for one night toward the end of the mini-trip.
That one reservation is so we can take a tour of Highclere Castle, which is where Downton Abbey was filmed. It is about 2 hours from Oxford, so we reserved one night at a pub called The Swan in Thatcham (about halfway to Oxford), and return the rental car the next day.
After Oxford, we want to see Scotland. It’s a long way by train or bus, so we are breaking it into two days. We catch a train from Oxford to Manchester, spend the night there, and get a bus the next morning to take us to Glasgow. There once a gain we may rent a car to see some of the sites outside of the city.
It’s a short bus ride then from Glasgow to Edinburgh, where we will be staying a few days before heading off to the heart of our trip – Ireland.
We will fly into Dublin and pick up a rental car for 30 days! Again, our plans are vague – we will head first into Northern Ireland, and then roughly circle the island counter-clockwise, eventually making it back to Dublin, where we return the car and spend a few days relaxing in the city before our flights back to the US.
By the way, we had enough points left so that our return flights costs us only $300. Across the Atlantic and back for two travelers for a total of $300 – not too bad!
This will be the fourth trip of 10 or more weeks that we have planned over the last two years. One of those was interrupted when we both had COVID in Prague, and one was cut short when I had to have my gall bladder removed. We’re hopeful that this time we can stay healthy and return with our remaining organs intact.
Look for updates on this site, and follow our podcast “Travels With Jim and Rita“.
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