Happy New Year! 2015 was certainly an interesting and eventful year for me. I survived two more semesters of my PhD, got married, went on a honeymoon and visited a few other places with family and friends. Looking back I am thankful for all of it.
As of right now I have two major trips planned for 2016. In May/June I’ll be heading to Canada for two weeks with mom and Vanessa. We are focusing on the southeastern corner, in and around Montreal. We’ll be visiting Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City and Saguenay National Park which has a beautiful fjord. It will be a new place for all three of us to explore. I know mom is looking forward to eating some delicious French food. Fun fact, Montreal has more restaurants per capita than New York City…so this bodes very well for our taste buds! Here’s an overview map of our itinerary:
I am particularly looking forward to exploring Old Quebec, which is supposed to be a little slice of Europe on this side of the Atlantic. It is full of cute little shops, beautiful architecture and cafes. We are also hoping to visit the Naval Museum of Quebec, which is named after the man (Stanislas-Déry) who saved my grandfather from the cold Atlantic waters after his crew torpedoed my grandfather’s u-boat during WWII. Their story is a neat one and is featured only minimally in the museum, but we want to go regardless. Unfortunately they’re going through a reno right now, but we are hoping to arrange some kind of collections access with a curator or something like that. Fingers crossed my museum background will help us get that together.
After our trip to Canada I’ll head back to Florida for two weeks before photographing a dear and close friend’s wedding in Orlando. And a few days after that Mike and I are heading out for our biggest adventure yet! Most of you probably already know that Mike and I are going to New Zealand. We made a huge amount of progress in our trip planning over this winter break. Hotels and AirBnB stays are all booked, as is the rental car and 90% of our activities/excursions. Aside from the obvious Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit sites we plan to go see, we have a lot of outdoor exploration planned. New Zealand is full of so many different types of environments from beaches and lagoons to plains to mountains and glaciers, that it was really hard to choose what we would manage to see in our short time there. However, we narrowed it down and our overview map looks like this:
We will be flying Tampa –> Dallas –> L.A. –> Sydney. We have two days planned in Sydney and then we continue on to Auckland. We work our way down the north and south islands and then catch a short flight from Queenstown back to Auckland before we head back Stateside.
Wanderlust und Heimweh 