It may be a bit early (almost more than 6 months early), but a few weeks ago we booked our journey back home. After our personal decision to leave after the end of my placement, we thought we should take advantage of where we are (both geographically and in life) and dive into our savings, travel and experience as much as we can now, and arrive home with a little debt (AND a perhaps a little something else as well).

Inspired by our colleagues Gerry, Mel, and Steve, we spent many hours on the Seat 61 web site and envisioned taking a trans-Mongolian train route through China, Mongolia, and Russia. However, the novelty of doing that trip during the middle of winter lost it’s lustre and thinking about the transit/VISA logistics was starting to become a headache. In the end, with the amount of time and funds that we had, we felt we would save that trip for another time and spend more quality time in Europe. Thanks to Laura from Airtreks.com (a U.S. based travel agency that specializes in around-the-world-trips), we managed to get a great deal for our long journey home.

So, the airport codes are as follows: KTM-DEL-HKG-NRT-HNL-OGG-NRT-MNL-AUH-CDG-LHR-KEF-YYZ-YVR

We leave Nepal the day after my birthday and via Delhi,  Honk Kong, and then Tokyo, we’ll spend 10 glorious days in western civilization (Hawaii) for one of our dearest friend’s wedding. As you can see, we are not that far away from home (about 6 hours away). Instead from there we will do a u-turn and fly west to hide out in the Philippines for the rest of the winter with my parents. Believe it or not, this will be my very first time back to the homeland.

Our journey then continues on via Abu Dhabi where we will resurface again to begin our Europe adventure in France. After a few days or so in the romance capital of the world, we’ll train it to Spain where I’ll attempt to learn how to drive standard and take our rental car (in hopefully one piece around Span (Madrid, Barcelona, Bilboa, Valencia) , through the south of France (Tolouse, Nime, Marseille, Arles, Grasse, Cannes) where we’ll hopefully drop it off safely in Italy.

In Italy, we will try to explore the coast (Florence, Genova, Bologna, Pisa, Firenze maybe), we definitely tour Rome, while coincidentally celebrating Easter Sunday with the Pope. From there, we’ll follow where the wind will take us (maybe through Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, maybe Greece) where we will ultimately have to end up in UK and the Netherlands to spend time with friends.

Our Europe trips ends when we leave London around the end of May. The adventure isn’t quite over yet as we have an unusual stopover in Iceland. When we saw that in our flight itinerary, we thought what the heck, “How often are we going to be in Iceland?”, and thus we decided to stay a few days to explore the land known as fire and ice.

We will arrive back in Canada and re-establish our footing in an exotic place called Mississauga, followed by a heavily scheduled itinerary of visiting family and friends (which of course will include a grand recap of our work and travels and explaining what dal bhaat is). We’ll spend a month and a bit in Ontario (with a slight detour to the states once I steal my parent’s car) before we head back to good ‘ol BC.

(I would very much like to head back to BC via train but…. we’ll see).

We’ll be armed with our cameras, laptop and mobile devices in order to try to keep everyone up-to-date (I also cannot also wait to try and blog about it along the way via Lonely Planet’s BlogSherpa program.

It is going to be a PHENOMENAL trip.