Departure date for this year's trip to Europe is rapidly approaching. The planning is done and most of the bookings made.

We leave on April 21st and will be travelling for about 11 weeks this time, the longest trip we've done so far. Here's the itinerary:

• Fly to London via Dubai with Emirates. Jan's daughter Natalie and her partner Dom have been living there since late 2018. We'll stay with them for a few days and reacquaint ourselves with a city that neither of us seen for many years.
• Fly to Florence for a one-night stopover.
• Join Lee and Rod, our great friends from Melbourne, for three weeks at a farmhouse villa at Poggio Alla Croce in Tuscany. The four of us will be touring around Tuscan towns, and may fit in visits to see musician friends in Milan and Rome.
• From the villa we all travel through northern Italy , through the Swiss Alps and then to Nuremberg. Overnight stays at Bologna and Verona on the way.
• The group splits here for a few weeks. Lee and Rod go to Russia for a tour. From Nuremberg we drive to Normandy for a week at one of the Karma resorts. We'll have an overnight stop at Strasbourg on the way there.
• Nat and Dom may join us for part of the week in France.
• Drive back to Germany, with an overnight visit to Colmar, then staying at Bamburg on the way through to Leipzig. We've timed our stay in Leipzig to be able to see the boy's choir at St Thomas' church.
• Next to a small village on the Elbe river where we spend a week doing some walks and rides in the Saxon Suisse national park, and also spend some time sightseeing in Dresden.
• From Saxony we take a train for the two hour journey to Prague where we rejoin Lee and Rod for a three week exploration of Czechia. Starting in the capital we travel to Brno, Telc, Cesky Krumlov, Cesky Budevice and Pilsen.
• We then split again from Lee and Rod and fly to Palermo in Sicily. Nat and Dom join us again and we tour around the island for a little over a week before flying back home