I decided it was time for a gap from my career, and I left my job at the end of January 2008.
Travel blog entries: all, Spain, France, Germany.
Pictures from the trip are (slowly) being uploaded both here (gallery) and in the blog.
Thanks to San Jose of Wikipedia for the free map image.
Below is the original plan
February was for resting. I still had the rental house in Reading, and time to get back in touch with friends who I hadn't seen for a while.
March and April I'm going to get an Interrail card, start in Spain, and move northwards before places become too hot for me. (I like cold weather, but I want to see the places that I wouldn't even consider going to in summer). Part of that will be meeting random people, but as they'll be moving around themselves it's easier to choose locations - and be open to getting diverted to places that I hadn't considered.
I want to see the buildings in Barcelona and Carcassonne, and I fancy seeing the landscapes of the Swiss / Austrian Alps. There will certainly be a couple more stops in France or Italy before the Alps.
Around June - August I'm considering doing a 3 month "gap year" activity in one place. Haven't worked out what yet.
The current rough plan is:
And I'll stop at other places near that route which seem interesting.
Seeing the Alhambra, still working out what else.
There's a sleeper train onwards to Barcelona
No shortage of nightlife in addition to the architecture and scenery - I'm considering the better part of a week here.
I'm drawn to this by the architecture.
Can't find much about it on the tourist guides that I've seen, but it's hard to miss a scene like this.
The Black Forest puts me next to the Alps, and the Swiss landscapes.
There will be a blog for this, which I'll link to when I've worked out where it will be. That's mostly because I want to have the online comment features of a blog; and partly because I'll be accessing it from lots of cybercafes, and want to protect my main (email and website) account from keyloggers.
In the meantime, here are some photos I took earlier:
My email address is [my first name]@s.cotton.clara.co.uk. (The link is spamblocked - if you click on it, please take the number out of the address. This isn't meant to be hard, just something to stop spambots automatically harvesting the address.)