Summer by the Numbers

This summer was one that was full of travel and adventure like nothing I'd seen before in my life.  I'm well aware that we have been incredibly fortunate, not just with the opportunity to live abroad, but also with our ability to travel to all kinds of wonderful places.

When it came to planning our trips for this summer I knew 3 things that I had to work around. 

    1.  I needed to take the kids home as it's the only time they go home each year and it needed to be a minimum of two weeks. 

    2.  Michelle would be visiting most likely in July and we wanted to plan a road trip.

    3.  Josh was thinking of taking his VistaBreak and if he did (at the time we weren't sure if he would wait to take it or not) he would take it in August so I couldn't plan 1 or 2 for August just in case.

So in the end our timeline looked something like this:

June 17 - Last day of school
June 18 - leave for the USA
July 6  - Return from the USA
July 8  - Head out on road trip with Michelle, Kelly and all the kids
July 19 - Return from road trip 
July 22 - Friends in town thru Monday that we were entertaining
July 30 - leave for VistaBreak
Aug 21  - Return from VistaBreak

So all in all, we were literally in town for 12 days this entire summer - July 6-8 (and I wouldn't even call that 2 days since we didn't arrive til mid day on the 6th and left by noon on the 8th, just enough time to unpack, do laundry and repack) and July 20-29th.  Seriously, a crazy travel schedule.

But now that we are back and all the blog entries have been completed, I was curious about all that we had done and when I started putting it together it looked something like this... 

Number of countries visited:  7
(USA, Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Ireland and Greece)

Number of days on the road:  54

(summer vacation was a total of 75 days so just over 3/4 of vacation was spent on the road)

Number of islands visited:  4

(Devil's Foot, Hydra, Corfu, Paxos)

Number of hotels:  7

(Aix-en-Provence, Nice, Arles, Killarney, Swords, Athens, Corfu)

Number of houses:  8
(our house in Attleboro, my parents house, Josh's parents house, the Anastasia's house, our apartment in Spain, Rapallo Italy, Fanore Ireland and Paxos Greece)

Number of planes: 8
(to/from USA, to Ireland, Ireland to UK, UK to Athens, Athens to Corfu, Corfu to Athens, Athens to BCN)

Miles flown (guesstimate): 12455 miles / 20047 km
(definitely added to our carbon footprint!)

Miles driven (guesstimate): Too many too count... thousands???
Number of boats or ferries:  5
(Ray's boat, ferry to/from Portofino, ferry to/from Hydra, ferry to/from Paxos, boat rental on Paxos)

Number of pictures taken:  2673 (250 June, 1110 July, 1313 August)

Number of caves: at least 10!
(Doolin cave Ireland, caves of Paxos)

I sit here trying to think of more numbers for our summer but after all this travel, my brain is a bit mushy!  All I can say is it is a summer we will never forget and hopefully we're all ready for the new school year to begin which will bring new adventures and challenges that we will all have to face.  It also brings us closer to our halfway mark (speaking of numbers) to our time here in Barcelona.  Now that I've shared all our summer travel stories with you, I hope to go back to more of our traditional life in Spain stuff and talk all about the new things going on as we get closer to that halfway mark.

Julie