How did we come up with this crazy idea to travel Around the World?

It started small!

The idea for our trip of 10 countries in 100 days actually started as a much smaller idea for our next adventure. My husband and I were talking, over cocktails, (which is how all of our travel planning gets started!) and we were discussing where we wanted to go in 2018.

We have been going on an international trip almost every year for the last few years and loving it so we knew we wanted to go somewhere!

He said he wanted to go to SE Asia. I said that I would love to end up in Spain for our 20th wedding anniversary. And even though we wanted a predominately warm vacation, we agreed that we should return to New Zealand (during what would be their fall season) to tour the South Island. We also decided that if we were going to be in New Zealand, then we would only be a hop, skip and a jump from seeing my cousin and his family in Australia…and so on and so on and so on!

Well, next thing you know, we were ordering tons of travel books and mapping out possible routes around the world. I am an equal opportunity travel book lover! I don’t discriminate. I love DK Eyewitness Insider for their beautiful pictures. I love Rick Steves for his history and “best of” information. I love Lonely Planet even though I am not a young backpacker-it has great tips. I also love Foder’s and National Geographic.

We also ordered a couple of big, beautiful coffee table books filled with amazing pictures to inspire us. I really liked National Geographic Worlds Best Travel Experiences  and Lonely Planet The Travel Book . Another fun and popular book is Atlas Obscura -if you are looking for strange and different things to see all over the world, this book might just be for you!

We kept thinking maybe this was a really crazy idea but then we just kept coming back to the fact that the timing in our lives was actually perfect for a trip like this. So we went for it!

After a few months of talking and reading books and blogs and travel forums, we had a pretty good idea of our plan. Now we just needed to put our destinations into the Star Alliance Round the World website and see what happened. (we did look at a few other airline Round the World plans but Star Alliance ended up being the best match for what we wanted to do.) It took a few weeks of planning and reworking our itinerary to coordinate the locations that we wanted. We played around with dates and figured out how much time we wanted to spend in each location.

So, after multiple tries of mapping out our route, we had our plan! Holy smokes! Our crazy idea was becoming a reality!