Welcome to Be Back Whenever where Mark and Susan blog about their continuing travel adventures, starting with the Around the World 9 month trip in 2017-2018! Seven years later after a break for COVID and chemo we’re still adding to our United miles.
March – April 2024
Way back in 2018 during the RTW trip, we met Australians Mark and Gayle on the Indian Pacific from Perth to Sydney. We agreed to meet in Australia again and ride The Ghan railroad from north (Darwin) to south (Adelaide). Chemo, COVID, and schedules got in the way but FINALLY March 2024 worked. We made the reservations for the 3 day trip in 2023. Over the year, the trip grew in length until we ended up flying to Brisbane at the beginning of March 2024, riding the Ghan, doing a road trip from Adelaide to Sydney for about 3 weeks before flying to Queenstown, NZ, and doing another road trip for a month in NZ.
Here are some pics and stories from our adventures!
January-February 2024
Susan had a momentous birthday and needed a fun place to celebrate. Here’s the tale of the trip and some pictures to go along with it! First stops – NYC, Amsterdam, and Ijmuiden I love Bruges, Belgium, and decided I wanted to spend my birthday there. We took the train from Amsterdam to Brussels for 2 days and on to Bruges for Susan’s actual birthday. We visited Ghent 30 years ago on our first trip to Europe. Why not check it out now? It’s a very short train ride from Bruges – off we went for a few days.
Haarlem is near Ijmuiden, the port for our cruise that we weren’t on. A friend works in Haarlem; we’d already arranged to visit with her before the cruise was cancelled. Next stop – Haarlem, Netherlands.
The birthday trip ended by flying home from Frankfurt via JFK and New York.
September – October – November 2023
After an all clear CT Scan in September, it was time to head off on attempt #4 at reaching Nepal. We wandered around the world to get there so come along and see where we go. The adventure begins
Next stops were by train to Salzburg and then Stuttgart.
Now it was time to fly further to the east for a visit to Angkor Wat and Siem Reap, Cambodia.
We still had some time before Nepal so we decided a week at the beach in Ao Nang, Thailand and some time in Bangkok would be good and pretty cheap places to hang out.
We finally made it to Nepal. It takes a few blog posts to tell this story. After Nepal we came home via Rome to NYC repositioning cruise and were back in Fort Collins on November 29 in time to visit the oncologist again. His prescription – “keep active and that means keep traveling” and will we adopt him?
Summer 2023
In our last blog, we swore we’d stay home all summer and enjoy a Colorado summer. We ALMOST succeeded but we had to take two small trips. After all, it rained all of June although I’m not quite sure why that would make us travel. Check out the 2023 summer travels.
I’m a big list maker. My latest list is the countries we’ve visited. Here they are!
2023 has arrived. Time for another trip!
We began 2023 in New York City, followed by French Polynesia and Hawaii. Sue H. texted while we were in Hawaii and asked if we wanted to join them on a Nile cruise. After thinking about it for 30 minutes, we said “Yes” and added a Jordan pre-trip to it. Check out the posts about this fun adventrue. We added 2 more countries and a few more airports since 2021. Time for an update!
Now, we SWEAR we’re staying home for the summer.
It’s 2022 and time to start a new adventure!
We ended 2021 with a trip to French Polynesia to see Tahiti, Moorea, and Bora Bora, all of which were great – warm water, manta rays, fish, nice people. We survived COVID and were ready to travel again. These plans came to screeching halt in February when Susan was diagnosed with colon cancer and a vastly different trip began involving surgery and 6 months of chemo. Mark and Susan survived that trip but didn’t go much further than the cancer center (2 miles) and various places in FC.
Now it’s time for Trip 2 in 2022. First stop is Munich for the Christmas markets before we head to the Maldives for Mark’s birthday, Singapore, NYC, and back to French Polynesia. Come along on the journey!
2019 Fall trip – Cumberland – Kettwig – Munich – Sicily – Pompei – Capri – Rome and home again – with Las Vegas thrown in!
This started out as a perfectly normal trip to celebrate a few birthdays and then spend a month in Sicily but involved a change at the beginning. Summer of 2019 turned out to be concert summer – Rolling Stones, Billy Joel, Zac Brown, and Michael Bublee. When a friend wanted to see Keith Urban in Las Vegas, we thought why not??
The Keith Urban concert ended up giving us a crazy travel day! We flew to LV on Thursday 9/5, saw the concert on 9/6 after standing in 2 lines for some ticket issues, enjoying the 107 F heat with 9% humidity on 9/7, and then a crazy travel day on 9/8. Here’s a the short and sweet travel day – alarm at 4:15 AM, flight at 7:30 AM, land in Denver and pick up the rental car at 10:30; drive home to FC; wash clothes and run a few errands and repack; drive back to Denver to spend the night for out 8 AM flight on 9/9. We tried to stop for dinner in Brighton on the way to the airport but a big storm knocked out the power to part of the city, including our favorite restaurant, Santiagos.
On 9/9 the “real” trip started and off we go on our next adventure! Check out the maps on the statistics page.
Road Trip to Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming – May 2019
Time for a 2300 mile road trip for a wedding, visit with friends and family, and sightseeing in North Dakota! We can finally check ND off our states to visit. Susan has 2 left and Mark has 3 states to go!
Packing was easy – a duffle bag each!
An Irish trip with Julia – March 2019
Mark’s sister, Julia, wanted to go to Ireland over her Spring Break and asked us to be her guides. Fast forward to March 15, 2019 and we met Julia at the Dublin airport, picked up a rental car and started her adventure. The blogs have the tales of the trip and as Mark says, he didn’t leave anyone by the side of the road!
Time to hang out in Maui – February 2019
It’s winter so it must be time to head off to Maui for a month! We’re in Maui and hope it’s an uneventful trip and we have a hard time finding stories to put in the blog! We’ll be back in Fort Collins March 2, just in time to wash the beach clothes, put them away, find cold weather clothes and head off to Ireland for a few weeks with Mark’s sister Julia. Maybe some good stories there!
Check the blog where I posted a few Maui pics. BTW … packing for a month of Hawaii weather is WAY easier than packing for Around the World!
Off we go again – August 2018!
We’ve been home for about 3 months now so it must be time to take another trip! We’re off in August for a cruise to Alaska with a land tour added on to Denali. After a stop to visit Mom, we head off to Europe for about 2 months – Norway, Sweden, Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga, Krakow, Munich for Oktoberfest, a few weeks in Malta, and two weeks of cat sitting in Geneva.
The packing was WAY easier for this trip than for the RTW trip last year!
As of November 2, 2018 …
6 AirBnb – Bergen, Stockholm, Tallinn, Riga, Krakow, Melleiha; home stays with 5 sets of friends, 9 hotels, 1 cruise, 3 new airports, 3 ferries, and a few train rides thrown in. Check out the statistics page …
The RTW Trip … August 2017 – May 2018
We’re including the planning, frustrations, great companies (or not so great companies) and products we’re using on this trip. We’re also answering questions from friends and family about how to plan/pack/navigate a trip for 9-12 months.
You can check out our schedule for the trip and the statistics of the trip. We blogged along the way, too, with the tales of our travels!
After 63 different hotels and apartments; 17 countries (18 if you count the Istanbul airport); 31 different flights; 11 different trains; 5 ferry rides; and 262 days, we made it home! It’s July 9 and we’ve been home 52 days. It seems as if we were never gone.
Beers and Signs!
Being from Fort Collins, CO – home to about 23 microbreweries – we like to check out microbreweries around the world and we’re keeping track of the ones we visit on the Microbrewery and Beers page. This page has info on all the beer we tried around the world. Is this why people wonder why our pictures always have a beer in hand?? Microbreweries along the way updated May 8, 2018
Check out 2018 Fall signs and signs from Ireland we found along the way. These are updated as of 2023. We take pictures of interesting/confusing/amusing ones as we go.