We are traveling and home exchanging again after a 2 1/2 year hiatus!

Our last home exchange was in July of 2019, when we went to Seattle, Washington. We had to cancel our scheduled home exchange to Porto, Portugal, for 2020. However!We were lucky and fortunate in that we got our money back for the airfare and we kept our jobs and were able to work from home during the pandemic. We turned down a few offers for home exchanges in 2021, it's not that we weren't traveling, we went to Ohio for a wedding and visited friends in Chicago, because we decided that we would only visit family and friends during 2021. Now, that has changed in a big way!

We are going on a two month exchange in the UK! That's right, two months! We have a heck of an itinerary planned too, we are going to be visiting our many friends on that side of the ocean and that means a lot of travel: 

1. March 31st: Land in Dublin, Ireland, and then take the express bus to Newry, Northern Ireland, and then a taxi to our home-away-from home in Rostrevor 
2. March 31st - April 20th: See as many sites as possible in Northern Ireland and The Republic of Ireland, all while driving on the opposite side of the road. Make day trips to Belfast.
3. April 21st - April 24th: take bus to Dublin airport and fly to Gatwick Airport where a friend and former co-worker is picking us up and then driving us to Rye, England, where we will all spend four days doing touristy stuff along with her boyfriend, who is driving separately with their luggage and their dog.
4. April 25th: Our friends will drive us back to their place in London where we will stay the night so Don and I can meet up with different friends for a night out.
5. April 26th-May 6th: Fly back to Dublin and then a bus to Rostrevor. See more sites, visit more pubs, and do more stuff in Northern Ireland.
   
6. May 7th: we go to Scotland via - driving to Belfast and taking a ferry to Cairnryan, Scotland, then we drive to Fort William where we will stay the night at the Loch Leven Hotel & Distillery. 
7. May 8th-10th: Leave Fort William and drive to the Isle of Skye and stay with friends for three nights.
8. May 11th-13th: Leave the Isle of Skye and drive to Edinburgh where we stay for three nights.
9. May 14th-18th: Drive back to Cairnryan and take the ferry to Belfast and drive home. Do more touristy things for a few days and then say goodbye to all the friends we will have made in Rostrevor.
   
10. May 19th-25th: Leave Rostrevor for good. Take the bus to Dublin Airport and fly to Stockholm, Sweden, to stay with our friend for seven nights.
11. May 26th-29th: Leave Sweden and fly to Dublin. Stay in Dublin for four nights.
12. May 30th: Leave Dublin and fly home. 

Whew! That's three different airlines (Delta, RyanAir, KLM), four different hotels (Loch Leven Hotel and the Radisson Blu in Scotland, The Old Borough Arms in Rye, England, and the Aloft in Dublin), five countries (Republic of Ireland, N. Ireland, England, Scotland, and Sweden), three currencies (Euro, British pound, Krona), express buses, taxis, local buses, and one ferry. I have been working for days putting all of this together, looking up timetables and comparing times and prices, emailing friends to set-up dates for visiting, and checking websites to see what we need to do to enter different countries (as of now, nothing, all restrictions have been lifted, except for the USA, we will need a negative covid test before arriving back here, but that could change by May 30th). I'm tired but ready to travel! Stay tuned for pictures in about three days!