September, 2023
Back in April of 2023 we first got the mad notion to take some sort of prolonged trip overseas. After much discussion, one place emerged as the favorite “must see” destination – Athens, Greece. Neither of us had been before, and it seemed like a good place to launch a tour of Eastern Europe.
We would start with a week or so in Athens, take a ferry to the island of Mykonos for a couple of nights, and then then move to Thessaloniki, the next largest city, to get an idea of Greek life away from the major tourists spots. From there we would hop across the Aegean to stay a week in Istanbul.
After that, we planned shorter stays in Vienna and Prague, possibly with a day trip to Budapest, before going to spend almost two weeks exploring another country on both of our radars – Croatia.
Then we would head home. However, when looking for flights back to the US, I stumbled upon a really cheap flight from Croatia to Barcelona, Spain. Why not spend a week in Barcelona too, before crossing the Atlantic? It was in the general direction of home, after all.
Then when looking at flights from Barcelona to DC, I found that TAP (the Portuguese airline) had a decent rate with one stop in Lisbon. Moreover, they offered a discount on the flight if we did an “extended layover” of 2-7 days in Lisbon! So naturally, we decided to spend four nights in Lisbon before the final leg back to the US.
So we ended up with a nine-week long mega-journey. We had all of the plane reservations, AirBnBs everywhere but Prague, where we would take advantage of American Express points to stay in a luxury hotel. Now all we had to do was wait for September, when our journey would begin!
Now since this was such a complicated schedule, and with so much time for stuff to go wrong before we started, we also decided to buy Trip Interruption/Cancellation Insurance. This cost us about $1000, but as we will see, it turned out to be a wise decision.
Enough foreshadowing, it is time to take off for Greece!