Yosemite, California, USA
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Countdown To Rio

January 26, 2024 /

It’s that time again. Never mind counting the days, we’re just arriving at the stage where we’ll be counting the hours until we lock the doors behind us and head to Heathrow to start our next great adventure. The exotic, vibrant city of Rio de Janeiro awaits, one of the world’s greatest carnivals about to begin, romantic sounding locations like Copacabana, Ipanema and Corcovado soon to be on our doorstep. It’s a little over a week until the journey begins.

After waking up on New Year’s Day many thousands of miles from home in each of the last two years, this feels like a late start for us and the wanderlust is not so much an itching in our feet as a yearning in our souls. We are very, very ready to get travelling again.

Looking back over our retirement years for comparison, our first travel year of 2020 had also not yet begun. It was on January 29th of that year that we flew to Bangkok, the world now our oyster after our recent retirement, the first of what would be many long journeys opening up before us. Little did we know as we sat here four years ago in a state of excitement that the strange news stories emanating from an obscure city called Wuhan would soon impact our travel year. In the end though, we still managed to travel for 148 days that year, despite the restrictions.

Temples of Bangkok, Thailand

In 2021, January was a month spent in the grip of lockdown and so again, at this point in the year, we had ventured nowhere yet, and in fact it wouldn’t be until July that we were finally able to flee these shores. We spent that summer travelling through Greece and the Greek islands before heading further afield later in the year.

Milos, Greece
Milos, Greece
Delphi, Greece
Chania, Crete, Greece
Iraklia, Greece

And so to January 2022 and by now the travelling dream was once again becoming reality. We spent the whole of January touring Costa Rica, moving on to California on the first day of the following month. Last year, 2023, the month of January was spent travelling around Panama, not putting our feet on British soil until the 26th.

Wildlife of Cost Rica

Now, after those two years of barely seeing any January days in England, we have been here for the whole of the month and the travel bug is calling very loudly as we tick off the last few days on the calendar.

Yosemite, California, USA
San Francisco,California , USA

We fly from Heathrow on the evening of February 5th. After that the next time we will see home will be towards the end of May.

Our next story begins in Rio.

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