Me and DS spent this evening planning

[JulietteLeGall]

some detonations we’d love to visit. It was a lovely way to take our mind off things and I’m thinking of actually creating a kind of ‘inspiration board’ full of pictures of the places we’d like to go. We’ve never been far so our choices are a bit vague.

I wonder if any well travelled MNers could whittle it to a more specific area for us ?!

I would love to go to Vermont or similar, or somewhere in Canada with breathtaking scenery, forests, rivers, mountains, waterfalls. Log cabin. Autumn.

Top of his list is Japan. Inspired by Spirited Away. Food, scenery again, tech etc.

Plus any more suggestions would be wonderful

This is probably more of a dream board than an inspiration board, for me at least, but we found it very therapeutic just thinking about it

Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Detonations? Sometimes old chimneys are taken down - there may be a web site?

Oh I love this! I did this with my kids a few years ago. My husband was away on a work trip and while he was I got them all psyched up for a round the world trip..... we both work from home so I figured we could work from anywhere.

We made a big massive poster of the world and flags and photos and headed it all up after Dr Seuss 'Oh the places you will go'.

Anyway husband poured cold water on the idea when he came home due to dodgy wifi and 3 small children in the same room while travelling so it never did happen but honestly I think the planning was more fun than the trip might have been.

We have been able to do some cool trips and we did compromise with renting in a ski resort for a season and taking one of the kids out of school for a term and that was fun. The kid was hopelessly behind when they got back to school so maybe not recommended but they do remember it as wonderful and we did try with home schooling it was just that what with work, and visitors.... and all the skiing there wasn't much time for it!!!

The Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee/No Carolina and the surrounding area; the National Park, Cherokee NC, Asheville NC, Gatlinburg TN. Gorgeous area year round and so much to see and do. Lots of history and Appalachian and Cherokee history.

Or in the same area drive the Blue Ridge Parkway from Shenandoah Natl Park Virginia to Cherokee NC.

Then of course there's Yellowstone and Grand Teton Natl Parks in Wyoming and Montana. Not accessible in the Winter, but so much to see and do in the other three months. Not as easy to get to as the Smokies unless you drive but well worth it.

And there's always driving Hwy 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Great coastal scenery and lots of places to see en route.

The rocky mountaineer train Vancouver to Banff was pretty stunning scenery. Had a log cabin in Banff

The West coast of Canada is gorgeous, but Canada is staggeringly expensive. We went for 3 weeks and flights for the 4 of us were £1100 (sign up to Jack's Flight Club, even just the free tier for great deals) which was good value, but then between a family hotel room, car hire and food (and we only ever had 2 meals a day) it was over £16k!

Loved the Stellenbosch and Cape Town areas of South Africa, wouldn't recommend staying in Cape Town itself, but we were due to go back for Christmas this year to a resort in the wine region. We stayed in the absolute top of the range hotel with acres of gardens, 12 restaurants, semi private pools between 8 rooms etc for around £200 a night and that was over Christmas. It's an inexpensive place to travel.

Iceland, loved it there and while it has a reputation for being expensive we rented a gorgeous log cabin for £700 for the week, and flights were under £50 per person. Food is a bit more expensive in the supermarkets, not much, restaurants and alcohol are probably double what it is here. The scenery is amazing, it's like the Lake District on steroids. Car hire was staggeringly expensive though, more than the log cabin and that was through Sad Cars who are much older hire cars (ours was older than us!) but from somewhere like Avis we were looking at well over £150 a day.

If your credit rating is good sign up to a rewards credit card such as Amex, and set it to pay in full each month, the airmiles rack up really really quickly just from day to day purchases you would make anyway and we usually travel long haul for just the airplane taxes once a year.

We love to travel but for many years it wasn't really in our budget, so we always set ourselves the goal of seeing how much extra we could make on the side, and we used that to travel with.

@Fannybawz

I want to: take the train from Istanbul to the Iranian border. Across capadocia... fairy Houses etc

Also there’s a Cruise that goes from Finland (not sure which port) to St Petersburg which avoids need for visa

Finally: Japan - all of it

If you go on a cruise and it stops in Russia, you don’t need visas provided that you are booked on an official tour so all the time off the ship is with official tours. By official, I don’t mean government led or anything - there are lots of really good commercial tour companies who are very willing to tailor the tour to your interests.