Preparing for lift-off

Hi all -

Welcome to the blog! Nikita and I are counting down days until liftoff in the single digits now, so I (Chester, now unemployed) thought it would be a good time to launch. I'll cover a bit about us, where we are at in life, the reasoning for this trip, and where we are going.

About Us

For any readers stumbling across this blog, we are Nikita and Chester, two 30-something Bay Area natives. We met the old fashioned way - dating apps - in 2018 and after four years of happiness and fun, got engaged on January 1, 2023 and married April 27, 2024. Nikita is a UCLA graduate working as a Data Scientist in tech and I am a UBC graduate formerly working as a...Data Scientist in tech. Most recently, we lived in Oakland near Lake Merritt.

This trip, our "super honeymoon", has been something we have been considering for a long while. I don't recall when it first emerged as a possibility, but we both had a love of travel before our first date and our trips as a couple to the southwest US, Spain, Guadeloupe and more have been big building blocks in our relationship. So naturally, we knew we wanted to take a honeymoon and that is a large part of what this trip will be - a chance for us to enjoy our new marriage, see beautiful places, and enjoy delicious foods together. 

But it is a bit more than that. We are at a turning point in our lives between our first post-college jobs and leaning into our middle careers, between being a just the two of us to maybe more, between living in the city and possibly being suburbanites. We want to take this extended trip as a chance to breathe and explore outside of our comfort zones before we focus on those next steps, which will be very gratifying but impede our ability to do things like travel.

More than a life turn, this chance is also a specific moment that is a good segue to exactly how we are able to pause our lives like this: Nikita is able to take advantage of an unpaid sabbatical that is offered after five years of service at her company and I had reached a natural ending point at my job and am ready for a new opportunity. Knowing that this trip was likely, we moved out of our apartment in Oakland last July and have been doing short-term exploratory rentals around the Bay Area while we prepare for this trip. Over the last year, the trip has gone from a hope to a reality and we are very excited to get started.

We know this opportunity for us would not be possible without the support people have given us. First and foremost, our parents have been very supportive both in the big picture in getting us to the point where we are happy and stable enough in our lives and careers to do something like this, but in the small picture have been very tolerant of the chaos of aligning our lives to take this trip and have allowed us to stay for weeks at a time in the months leading up to the trip. Ditto to our friends who have allowed us to crash, housesit, and just been understanding of this undertaking. Finally, Nikita and I know we are very fortunate to have found ourselves in careers and lives that allow this sort of flexibility and freedom.

The Trip

Where are we going? We know hearing about other people's travel plans can be a bit like listening to someone go on about a niche interest endlessly, but we'll assume if you are here, you want to know the details.

We fly out next week to Portugal, where we will have a couple days to just get over our jet lag before flying to Italy, where we will spend the most days of our trip. We will mostly be doing mostly the greatest hits of Italy, working our way north over about four weeks. From there, we head into the Alps for an arc through Switzerland, Austria and Slovenia. We slip out of the EU for visa reasons at this point, visiting Bosnia, Montenegro and Albania before heading down to Turkey where we will spend about three weeks on the Aegean coastline. We will then head back into the EU for some Greek island hopping. We conclude Europe with some time in Germany.

With 89 of our 90 days allowed days on our EU tourist visa used, we will fly to - record scratch - Uzbekistan for a week of exploring a part of the world that is very far from home. Onward to a few weeks Japan covering most of the introductory sites and cities as it will be both of our first time there. Finally - we are almost done here - we are aiming to end in India for another few weeks before flying home a week or so before Thanksgiving.

It's a lot! It is possible we are letting our ambitions outpace our energy and budget, but we've been mindful to leave days for rest and avoid moving so fast that we are staying in places for only a night. We may find that we are moving too fast, or less likely, too slow, and can change it our planning if we need to.

Speaking of planning - as you may be able to tell, we have made a pretty detailed plan of where we plan to be and when. As much as letting the wind and our whimsy guide us would be nice, there is the reality of lots of other tourists wanting to see the same things at the times we are in some of these countries, so we have opted to plan and book almost all our hotels and flights in advance. We've left the daily options open and mostly gone for refundable accommodations, so it is not written in stone, but we don't expect continental changes. India remains a large question mark at the end of the trip though; aside from seeing Nikita's family in Delhi we do not have any concrete plans.

So that is that! We hope this has given you a good overview on our trip. We plan to update maybe every couple weeks and also throw in some practical notes on packing, career pausing, insurance and other exciting things. I may get up to some philosophical oversharing as well, we will see. 

Thanks for reading!