Well, hey there everybody!   Long time no see!

Yup, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve blogged so time to catch you all up…

The trip that never was

As some of you know, I had a trip all planned for the Spring of 2020 starting in April and ending in June.   I was going to visit 8 countries in the Balkans after not having traveled for 2 years.   It was going to be glorious!

And then covid hit and, well, everything went to shit.   As much as I hated postponing the trip, at least I was able to get everything refunded and I thought “hey, no worries, we’ll just postpone the trip til the Fall – only 6 teeny, tiny months away…”

Well, we all know how that ended up, don’t we?   Six months came and went and covid still had a stranglehold on the world and nobody was going anywhere.

Balkan Trip 2020 would have to wait…

Finding Todd

I tell ya, the name of my travel blog has never been so true as it has been this past year.

After traveling to more than 40 countries on several trips in a 5 year span, I’ve now been grounded for almost 5 years.   Stuck in day-to-day life like so many others.

I’m older now and that spark I had to travel and see the world has been dimmed.   It truly is time to find myself again.

It doesn’t help that I now have two cats and the thought of leaving them for a few weeks or months just gives me an immense sense of guilt.

In fact, that mental block has kept me at home in 2022 when I definitely could have gone back traveling again.

And then, today happened…

A random reddit post

I woke up this morning as I normally do by flipping open my laptop.   I have the same routine every day.   I start by checking my emails, then Facebook, followed by twitter and, finally, checking out Reddit.

Normally, I’m just mind numbingly scrolling through Reddit watching the public freakout videos and other interesting posts but today a random post stuck out to me.

It was a post about someone complaining about their astronomical service charge on their Ticketmaster tickets to a concert.

Now, you’re probably wondering what a random post about service charges to a concert could possibly have to do with jump starting my travel adventures…

Well, that concert was Depeche Mode.

I’m a huge Depeche Mode fan and, in fact, the last time I saw them in concert was during my first Euro Trip when I was in Belgrade, Serbia.

Every so often I’ll check their official website to see if there’s a tour on the horizon and every time I’ve checked for the past few years, I’ve only seen their old concert tour listings.

So, when I saw this reddit post this morning, imagine my excitement!   Depeche Mode was going on tour again!

A spontaneous decision

I spent the next hour on the Depeche Mode website checking out their upcoming tour dates.   Obviously the first thing I checked was if they were playing in my hometown of Vancouver.

I won’t lie, I was actually kinda happy when I saw they didn’t have any dates for Vancouver because it meant I could start looking at European dates.

Their tour starts in March 2023 with a few dates in North America before heading to Europe ending in mid August.

Ideally, the band would have a date in one of the countries I wanted to visit on my Balkan Trip but they only had one date at the end of July in Bucharest, Romania and traveling in the summer months has never been appealing to me.

Then I spotted a couple dates in Amsterdam in May.   Oh, this could work.   When I was doing my initial planning for Balkan Trip 2020, I had looked at Amsterdam as a possible ending point of my trip so, why not do it again.

I found the ticket I wanted and hit the “select” button….

I then proceeded to stare at the little 10 minute count down on the ticketmaster site.   I had 10 minutes to decide if I was REALLY gonna do this…

10 minutes passed and I pressed cancel.

Then I went back and selected the seat again, and again, I didn’t press the “confirm” button.

Was I really going to buy this ticket?   Was I really going to go to Europe on a whim?

Was I really?

I selected the seat for a third time and this time I hit “confirm”.

And now…

It’s time to go traveling again in 2023!

Coming this May!

Stay tuned!

BeNeLux Trip 2023, Balkan Trip 2023, Pretrip, Trip Journal
Benelux 2023
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