Today marks seven years since we started our blog and to “celebrate” that anniversary we pulled out our old school method of planning a trip

Our first trip together was prior to this blog, we took a three week trip to Morocco. Sue found some super cheap flights to Paris and so we booked them and figured we would decide what to do later.

We quickly decided that since we had both been to Paris before – albeit separately – we would use Paris as the jumping off point. We settled on a road trip in Spain, with a couple days in Morocco. We wrote down all the places we wanted to see and put them on post-it notes on a wall in my apartment. We slowly moved them up or down depending on how much we wanted to do something. As time went on, we found that all the places in Morocco were higher than the places in Spain. So we changed course and decided to fly directly from Paris to Morocco and spend the entire trip there.

It was a great trip and we wrote emails to our family with updates on our travels. From there…the blog was born. We wrote the blog for each of our trips, and filled it in with general thoughts, comments on life and musings on what we were going to do. Two years later – the pandemic hit, our granddaughter was born, and we decided to sell up and move closer to her.

The following year, our restless souls got the better of us and we let the lease go on our house, put everything into storage and the Happy Idiots Tour began.

July will make it four full years of the tour.

This week we are planning our summer/fall wanderings. Sue proposed we head to Helsinki for July (only because we hadn’t been there and I wanted to see the world’s happiest people). We were in Copenhagen last year in November, which was cold and dark, but we still liked it, so another Scandinavian city during the summer seemed appealing. We added Svalbard to list because it is above the Arctic Circle and we get to have 24 hour sunlight after having been to Ushuaia for the southern hemisphere’s summer solstice. Svalbard would get us as far north as we could go, for close to the northern hemisphere’s summer solstice. It just seemed like a cool thing to do.

Our plan was to go to Helsinki directly from Chicago, then spend a weekend in Svalbard. Alas, we ran into a challenge getting from Chicago (where we will be in June) to Helsinki – there are no direct flights (call us snobs, but we really prefer a direct flight — less room for error). We looked at various options and then noticed that Icelandic allows you to split a flight from the U.S. to Europe by stopping in Iceland for a few days.

To get to Svalbard from Helsinki, we would need to connect through Oslo. Since Icelandic flies to Oslo, too, we decided to spend a few days in Iceland, then complete the Icelandic flight in Oslo. From Oslo we would fly to Svalbard for the weekend and finally head to Helsinki, a few days later than we expected, but having crossed Iceland and Svalbard of the bucket list.

So now onto the old school planning method…We grabbed some post-its and started making notes on what we wanted to do in Iceland and Svalbard to figure out how many days to spend in each and make sure that we didn’t do the same things in both places. We read reviews, matched trip dates and hours and tried to maximize the days we had and the trips we wanted to make. Finally, we settled on how many days we wanted in each. Three and half days in Reykjavik and two and half days in Svalbard.

Our exact dates and excursions will have to wait for another blog….

Let’s see if we can continue to keep you interested enough to make it eight years.