Whenever you put six people together that have completely different ideas and dreams, it takes a very long timto figure out a plan that everybody is agreeable with. For example, tonight….

The way the semester works out, we have 9 vacation days, a long 4-day weekend, and another long 5-day weekend. So, we could stay in Segovia, hit up Madrid for a few days, or leave the country and explore somewhere else. Well, our little group have pretty much decided that we want to leave Spain at one point to explore another country while we are here in Europe. Now that was easy, deciding where to go was the hard part. We all have different spending budgets and previous travel history that made the task that much harder. We agreed that we didn’t want to travel alone, nor did we want to spend more time on the road than in a city. After all this, some wanted to go to Paris, Nice and Lyon, or off to London, east to Rome, Florence and Venice (my idea!) or just delve into the country of Spain.

So, after hours of deliberation and compromises, we figured out that (tentatively until something else comes up) we’ll do:

September 23-24 – Madrid
October 5-7 – Portugal
October 12-15 – Barcelona
October 21-29 (fall break vacation) – Northwest Spain: León, Santiago de Compostela, A Coruña, Gijon/Oviedo
December 6-10 – Ireland

We’ll see what actually happens.

I wish Italy was in the mix, but these will be great too.