Oh boy, this one's a pickle. Constantly planning for travel has proven to be an exhausting task. As I'm writing this I already know how privileged that sounds and it's true, it's a unique situation that I should be glad to be in but after being on the road for almost 2 months I dream of being at a 9-5 job and then coming home for some dinner and just relaxing. The grass is always greener though, right? I know I would be sick of that in about 2 days as well.

The dreaming part of planning is the easiest, possibly most fun part of the process.

So here is the pickle. We don't exactly know where to go after Europe. See, Europe has this puzzle that is known as the Schengen Visa. It states that for every 90 days you are within a certain list of European countries (almost all of them) for something such as tourism you must then leave for 90 days. For us, this happens to be in the middle of December.

The last 60 hours have been a whirlwind of potential plans with each time feeling that it was set in stone. Here is the madness:

Plan 1 -

• Leave Girona for Morocco
• Morocco for 2 weeks (where/what we will figure out later, see the trend?)
• Go to Athens for 2 weeks
• Head on to Istanbul

The more we looked at both Morocco and Athens we realized the time and energy we had for the amount of planning those two places deserved was not going to be available to us. It was a sad moment and one that hit the ego a little too. If I cant plan Morocco, how will I be able to plan other culturally foreign countries? This brought us to plan 2.

Plan 2 -

• Leave Girona for Toulouse France for a week
• Find a place that we have not yet discovered in France for a week
• Paris for 5 nights with a day at Disneyland Paris
• Onwards to Egypt skipping Istanbul and Athens

Why not France? France is easy, right??? France is expensive and not a place we wanted to spend long periods in just to widdle away time. Also, as much as Disneyland Paris looks fantastic, it was just a mere fleeting dream in the plan. Which brought us to plan 3.

Plan Three (or The-Out-of-Left-Field-Plan) -

• Leave Girona for Paris for 5 nights no Disneyland
• Fly to Cape Town, South Africa for a month

If there is one thing I'm being forced to work on during this trip is to not get emotionally invested in plans. Having set budgets for transportation, accommodation and activities really makes you stop and think about where your money is going. When plan three struck I was flying high, I had that dream back in me, I've always wanted to go to South Africa. But once again, that was the dreaming part of the planning. When the real planning started it was going to add up...fast. While the tickets down there would have fit the budget, it would have completely sapped all of our transportation allocations for the entire month, and that's just to get down there, we would still need to get out the following month which would likely zap the next months budget. While we also were able to find an Airbnb in our budget we knew that between those two items it wouldn't give us much more to do. We wouldn't be able to rent a car to drive the coast, we certainly wouldn't have enough money to go up north to a safari. It was hard to let go but once faced with the facts we just had to go back to the drawing board.

Plan Four -

• Leave Girona for Paris for 5 nights no Disneyland (sad)
• Fly to Istanbul for 10 days
• Head on to Egypt for the remainder of the month and into January.

This is starting to feel the most realistic and likely. Paris is a pretty pricey city but staying there in the beginning of December we were still able to find some semi-affordable accommodations that also seemed like a place we wouldn't mind laying our heads for 5 nights. Thankfully Istanbul is a lot more affordable and has a very reasonable air ticket.

And, hooray! We bit the bullet and chose Plan 4. What do you think, did we choose the right one?!