Adventure Blog
What Is Your Dream Trip?
The cover story of the March 2011 Budget Travel is “Dream Trips,” featuring itineraries in Morocco, Russia, Laos, the Caribbean and France. For me, Paris – a truly great city – isn’t on my list of dream destinations. True, I’ve been there more than once, but Paris, like most European cities, is an easy trip from New York and even without a lick of French, it isn’t too hard to get around. After all, France is a developed nation and for the visitor the quality of life is really no different than that of North America, but with more wine and butter (a good thing).
But as I’ve mentioned here before, riding the Trans-Siberian Railway is high on my list of dream trips. In my mind a “dream trip” is one that you don’t quite know how to make work, whether it’s a matter of scheduling or budgeting. Riding the rails across two continents and close to 6,000 miles of desolate terrain where you can’t even read most of the signs, let alone understand them, is a daunting, and enticing, challenge. It’s not something I fear but something I would want to prepare for thoroughly, while also leaving myself ample time to let delays and miscommunication happen. A Trans-Siberian Railway adventure is not a five-day jaunt to Rome, and this is what makes it exciting, and easy to avoid.
The article in the magazine is more about whetting your appetite than providing you with in-depth details, but it does provide URLs for booking tickets, as well as revealing this pretty amazing video project that lets you virtually ride the rails. It’s definitely easy to waste time exploring the website, though I’d much rather explore the actual trains, and hopefully some day I will.
As the Budget Travel article states: “Some dream trips seem destined to remain just that. But the fact is, the only thing that separates a fantasy from reality is a good, solid plan.”
What is your dream trip? Antarctica? Kenya? Fiji? Nepal?
