Masterpiece Trip 2017, Planning

Holy Crap. It’s Happening.

It’s surreal to me that after planning this trip for so many months the time has finally come. Yesterday I worked on setting reminders on my phone for things that need following up during this mammoth adventure and so far there are 36. Please don’t let me lose my phone. There’s a lot of moving parts to this trip, and I’m so paranoid that I’ve forgotten something vital. Like Santa, I’m checking my lists twice (and thrice).

Our first flight is 16 hours long. That’s a new record for us, edging out South Africa by an hour. And yes, friends, at some point I *will* get the Africa pics and posts up here, as well. Unfortunately that’s looking like 2018. Oops! So that’s why we are trying to stay on top of this huge trip and post as we go; it’s too hard to catch up later on.

So the plan will be to post about each destination we visit, with pics. There might also be additional pics posted to Instagram when we don’t have time or bandwidth for a full post. We’ll do our best.

Goals for this trip:

  • Safety
  • Good health
  • Everything else is a bonus

We have some fantastic things planned. Come along for the ride!

 

 

Masterpiece Trip 2017, Planning

That Freaking Volcano

There’s something I never thought I’d say…

Yesterday Salajander said, “No plans survive first contact with the enemy. In this case our fantastic trip is the enemy.” Ha!

Let me rewind the a bit. Yesterday was the one week countdown. Very exciting! The day started with me checking our various booked hotels to see if any of the prices had dropped. Two of them had – significantly. Huzzah! What a great Monday…until I started looking at Tripadvisor to do some additional last minute research on the cities we are visiting. Our first destination is Bali and almost the entire first full page of discussion topics were related to Mount Agung. Now don’t get me wrong, we already knew about the volcanic activity because we got an email via the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (recommended highly joining), but reading the threads it sounded like it was getting significantly worse with an eruption imminent.

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