A week from now, I’ll be waking up in Paris. A week tomorrow, I should be rolling into Budapest on the sleeper train. Beyond that? I have an interrail pass and a flight to catch in Istanbul in mid-April… I am so excited.

My bookings as far as Budapest and my flight from Turkey are 2 of the parameters on what I’m thinking of as my little Big Trip. I’ve got 4 weeks of sabbatical from work (this sounds fancy; it’s actually just 4 weeks max of unpaid leave that I can’t even combine with other leave to have more time, first world problems I know). I want to visit family in Australia. I want to reduce how much I fly because the air travel industry is disproportionately carbon-intensive (and trains are fun. Also my one thing I believe without evidence that I’d be really good at is the BBC show Race Across the World, where contestants have to go without flying and on a tiny budget from eg the top to the bottom of South America).

It’s my “little” Big Trip because actually 4 weeks is not much time once you start looking at how long it takes to get places. In the very early stages of thinking about things I had all sorts of ideas of absolutely maximizing my overland travel by racing through Europe and then could I go Bangkok to Bali without flying? Darwin to Perth? Could I cross India by train rather than flying over it? (Like I say, Race Across the World winner here.) What pulled me back to earth was… Google sheets. In particular, a whole bunch of Google sheets where I tracked actually how long things would take and how much slack would be in the plan, for various scenarios. Turns out, London to Perth is a really long way?? And I decided that this was meant to be a holiday with a bit of adventure, not a sheer endurance test.

So I’ve settled on a plan of London-Istanbul overland, fly to Perth, spend 10 days there, then fly to Athens and travel back from there to London via ferry and train. Wish me luck! I’m hoping to blog the trip, although whether I can be having with writing blog posts on my phone as I go, I’m not sure — I may be back to tell you all about it in May!