8 Countries in 9 Days

I'm cheating a bit with this catchy title, as it's not something that happened or is going to happen (at least not in the immediate future...).  But it is yet another example of the overambitious, crazy travel plans that George and I concoct when left to our own devices.

This was, again, a rather spur-of-the-moment decision that we came to over coffee one Saturday morning.  I had just learned the day before (this was sometime in late March) that there was a week in April that I wasn't needed, as the kids were off from school and would be with their father.  This was a welcome surprise that I desperately wanted to capitalize on.  Traveling is a difficult addiction to shake.

So, I mentioned it to George. He'd been talking about taking a trip in April for awhile, but nothing had materialized.  He suggested Greece, and I was immediately all over that plan.  I've been nursing an obsession with Greece for years (thank you, Mamma Mia).  It was actually the first country I wanted to visit once I arrived in Europe.  Mike's family owns a house on the island of Karpathos, and they were on one of their bi-annual trips there this past September.  Unfortunately, flights were atrocious at teh time, and I couldn't really find a way to make the timing work when I was only just moving to Germany then.

But now the timing did work, and flight costs had dropped massively.  Not much was standing in the way.

Aside from George and I, and our mutual desire to push the envelope.

At some point during the discussion, we decided that road-tripping to Greece from Germany was the way to go.  George loves to drive, and I would have been SO keen to make this title a reality.  After poring over Google Maps for a couple of hours, our tentative itinerary looked like this:

Day 1: Stuttgart to Venice, Italy
Day 2: Venice to Zagreb, Croatia (via Austria and Slovenia)
Day 3: Zagreb to Skopje, Macedonia (via Bosnia and Serbia)
Day 4: Skopje to Thessaloniki Greece.
Days 5-7: Greece
Days 8-9: Journey back to Stuttgart

As you can see, in many ways, it would have been an absolutely wicked trip.  Our passports would look AMAZING, we'd see a ton, and also definitely deserve bragging rights for the (minimum) 48 hours of driving that we would be doing.

However, after much consideration, we shelved this plan.  With just over a week to work with, all that driving was going to severely handicap our capacity to actually, ya know, see Greece.  Not to mention that we'd be "knackered"(I love using George's British phrases) with such a short turn-around between the driving days.  So, we shelved this plan in favor of more conventional modes of transportation for such a distance (AKA, planes).  We were also slightly worried about a few of the border crossings, as we really couldn't afford to get held up on such a tight schedule.

I stand by the fact that this would work well if there were two weeks or more to work with, though.