L101-Preparation Plan

First off let me apologize for the cheesy Landscape Architect influenced titles, but that’s what I do so I will inevitably be interjecting titles such as this throughout the tenure of my blog.  I hope to educate folks a little bit and also add some levity to my blog.  For the benefit of those outside of the field of design and construction let me explain this title.

L100-Preparation Plan:
At my current place of employment (and as is standard practice) when we create a set of construction documents there is an ‘L’ series of sheets, ‘L’ standing for Landscape (A for Architecture, C for Civil Engineering…so on and so forth).  The numbers following the L speak to the type of drawings.  A complete series would be as follows:

L100- Site Preparation Plan: This illustrates removals, and modifications to the existing site to ‘prep’ it in order to construct your proposed improvements.

L200- Site Layout and Utility Plan: This shows the contractor what he is building and ‘lays out’ all of the improvements through notation and dimensions.

L300- Site Grading Plan: This plan provides the proposed grades for the site to ensure storm water flows where it should, you know away from buildings and such.

L400- Planting Plan: This shows the proposed plantings…duh.

L500- Site Details: These sheets are a collection of drawings which detail certain items out that the plans in the set may not be able to illustrate clearly.

So after that long winded intro: L100- Preparation Plan…in design it would be the plan showing the plan of the site preparations…in my blog it is where I talk of the preparations for the trip!  Get it?!  Ha ha, it means 2 things!

So as with any trip we have been making many preparations for our trip.  Purchasing many (to me) fun necessities, such as lightweight back packs, lightweight clothing, a new lightweight laptop and for my wife new tiny lightweight makeup thingies (ßtechnical term).  She is ridiculously excited for this. 

So as you can see there is a theme at work here: Lightweight.  Who in the heck wants to be lugging a 100 pound bag through all of the airports of the world?

We have also had about 100 iterations of the itinerary.  This is primarily attributed to a unique feature of our trip: we have periods of times and locations where we will not be planning what we will be doing prior to departure.  We will rather make plans once we arrive at these spots. 

Let me take you through our itinerary as it currently exists:

1:         NYC.  To visit some close friends for 2 days.
2:         Miami.  To get a refresher SCUBA dive or two in.

3:         Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.  As of 2 weeks ago we finally booked this as our first international destination where we will be departing for a one-week live aboard SCUBA trip aboard the Humboldt Explorer!

4:         Peru.  Here we will trek to Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan City.  While in Peru we also hope to visit the Amazon and explore the natural beauty within.

5:         Madrid, Spain.  We will travel overland south through Spain stopping in Barcelona as we make our way to the South of Spain.

6:         Morocco.  We will depart Spain via ferry to make our way to the northern tip of Africa.

7:         Italy.  We will fly from Spain (once returning from Morocco) to Italy.  We will travel here for a few weeks.  We have plans to meet up with a couple friends of friends who have graciously invited us to stay here.

8:         Eastern Europe.  We will reach Eastern Europe and explore many of the countries here via, train and bus. Our time here will be mainly unscheduled.  A few key spots we hope to visit are: Croatia, where my wife’s family is from, Romania (Transylvania dude), Czech Republic, Turkey and Greece.

9:         Poland or Russia. We would love to make it into Russia, but have heard Visa’s can be tricky, so we may or may not be able to make it here.  If not we will head to Poland before beginning our trek home.

10:       Dubai, United Arab Emirates.  “…But you just said begin the trek home.”  Well yeah, but what good is just blitzing home when you can make a couple sweet stops along the way?!

11:       Cairo, Egypt.  This will probably end up as couple days to see the pyramids at least, because, well, they’re the pyramids!

12:       Home again!

Whew!  Anyone else tired?  Think we can pack that all in to 4 months!?  We are sure gonna try! 

Sound expensive, outrageously expensive?  In the beginning it sounded that way to me too… Stay tuned for the next entry (chees-ily entitled):  An Opinion of Probable Cost. 


***One last disclaimer, I must apologize for any grammatical errors that may occur within my blog.  I do my best to edit and proof read.  However, I am a Landscape Architect, not an English teacher.  So with that in mind, read through the errors y’all.