2025: A Look Back

my once-in-a-lifetime moment of the year

Overall, 2025 was a very good year for us. We rang in 2025 in Vienna, Austria and rang in 2026 on our Antarctica cruise!

As family, friends, and frankly, anyone who has ever read any other post related to our travel knows, C is the travel planner. And by that I mean he is THE TRAVEL PLANNER. He does all of the research, he finds flights, he finds hotels, he finds things for us to do and see, he works out all of the logistics...you name it, he does it.  I usually have very little idea about what's going on...a happy and blissfully ignorant "travel princess" who follows him blindly because I have been so incredibly fortunate to experience beautiful places around the world as a result of his efforts. He is amazing! My contributions are usually limited to two things: providing the parameters of my restrictive schedule so he can select travel dates and sometimes choosing between two or three hotels once he has whittled down the endless options. The only exception to our dynamic is that I typically book the hotels for our Disney trips and purchase any special event tickets; C still handles all of the other details and reservations!

obviously I am Partner 2
LOL

Our two big trips in 2025 were going to Africa over the summer and going to Antarctica over winter break and I am so pleased to share that I played a very active role in the planning! I was the one who researched and booked both our safari and our Antarctica cruise! C did all of the flights and hotels for those two trips outside of what I booked, since they involved traveling to multiple countries before and afterwards. I would be lying if I said I wasn't nervous about everything working out with the safari and the Antarctica cruise since I was the one who booked them and handled the communication about them for 17 months and 22 months respectively! Fortunately, the two companies we chose handled all logistics, down to the most minute detail, with extreme precision and we were able to visit our sixth and seventh continent and check that off our very lengthy travel bucket list! Having now been to all seven continents, I am even more in awe of my mom, who accomplished this back in 2014, with 3 of the 7 (Europe, Antarctica, and South America) being done with women's travel groups as opposed to family - meaning that for all intents and purposes, she did these three continents on her own. She wanted to go, so she went. She wasn't going to let anything stop her from getting to all seven. She was, and will always be, an inspiration to me. I often feel her presence, and as I wrote about back in July, I felt her acutely when we were in Kenya, but she was definitely with me in Antarctica, too.

In addition to our two big trips (Antarctica offers some of the most beautiful scenery we ever enjoyed and our safari was beyond life-changing!), we went to WDW twice (March and August), Disneyland twice (June and September), on a Disney cruise for spring break, as well as New Jersey, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Tampa, several trips to Canada, and some day trips to visit family! Plus I did a there-and-back-in-one-day trip to WDW with one of my best friends! It was a busy travel year for sure! New countries in 2025 were Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Hungary, and Argentina, and we returned to Germany and Austria (and obviously Canada and the U.S.).

I like to compile our travel data each year and when C and I were going through our 2025 calendars, it was pretty surprising to see our final numbers!

• total of 69 hotel nights (this number includes nights on a cruise ship)
• total of 25 flights (6 of which were red-eye flights)
• total of 9 nights spent in Canada
• 2 nights spent driving through the night to Canada

...which is a total of 86 nights not at home! 86 nights! That's so crazy!

2026 is looking pretty good in terms of upcoming trips! We've got four Disney Cruises scheduled this year, some quick weekend trips planned, and a long trip to Asia mapped out for the summer!

2025 marked 29 years of me being a vegetarian and 30 years of me living in the U.S. I also got my first new car since buying my Honda Pilot in November 2007! Most importantly, we celebrated three full years of having Avalanche in our lives! The joy he's brought to our lives means everything to us!

I was going to try and select a favorite picture from each month of 2025, but some months didn't really have any noteworthy ones and other months had several, so I just chose my favorites from the year!

Here's to a happy and healthy 2026!

Happy Tails to you!