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Coastlands, New Zealand

I was on my walk this evening with Poppy my treasured poodle, taking time to soak in the late afternoon rays of summer sun when I thought of my blog title.

Vernon and I worked for the same company for 10 years and it underwent a major restructure where my position became redundant, and Vernon took “voluntary redundancy”. We saw this as a fantastic opportunity to “step off the treadmill” and fulfil our dream of an extended trip to Europe. Children raised, mortgage paid, in-between jobs – why not?

It is an exciting and liberating prospect – and yes a few fleeting moments of fear, but we have this opportunity, each other and our health. Sure the financial commitment of it comes from our retirement savings but as we get older we see more and more that there is no guarantee of even making it to retirement, so we are just going to DO IT! What happens after, we will deal with after 🙂

We planned this trip ourselves relying heavily on Rick Steves travel DVD’s and internet research from other reviewers including TripAdvisor, Fodors and such. We did most of the booking ourselves except for International flights.

My career background is in Human Resources and Communications – PR, so I have used these skills to plan the trip like a major event in quite a structured fashion – researching and using spreadsheets extensively for the planning and tracking. We have never been to Europe before so there is a big unknown and a lot of hope that it will all go smoothly and meet our expectations.

Photography is with a Sony NEX 6 camera and kit lenses plus a Sigma 19mm. We also have a waterproof sony pocket for rough situations and the ipad for others. I am just a happy amateur with no training but love taking photos and video.

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