Holiday ro-OOOO-oooo-ooo ... um, uh, OOOO ... ooooooo ... oooooad.

Yes, my European vacation is about to begin.

If you noticed a few extra O's in the word "road" above -- though really, the jury is still out on the correct way to reproduce the elongated vowel sound from Lindsey Buckingham's "Holiday Road" -- it's because we are embarking on the longest trip I've ever taken. It's six weeks. 

My wife has taken longer. But I have not. And obviously my kids have not.

Want to hear the stops? You must forgive me for referring to some places by a city name and some by a country name. Although the journalist in me screams out for consistency, this is how we talk about the various stops on the trip, consistency be damned.

1) Dubai.

2) UK. (Includes both England and Scotland)

3) Paris.

4) Toulouse. (South of France.)

5) Barcelona. 

6) Venice.

7) Rome.

8) Egypt. 

9) Athens.

10) Crete. 

And yet all we could do was curse the number of places we're not going. 

If we wanted to make it a pure, unadulterated Europe trip, leaving out the stops in Asia and Africa, maybe we could have fit in a Germany, a Prague (there's that inconsistency again), a Netherlands. My older son requested Switzerland for some reason. 

But when you're pretty far away from this part of the world and haven't actually been here in 20 years -- 20 years and two months, actually -- you have to make the tough decisions, and the adults get to decide the must-do's and the unfortunately cannot do's. 

I'll have a tablet with me and I do hope to keep up with some blogging. We'll have to see how well that works out. And I am curious indeed what form my European movie viewing will take.

I've said I might not watch very many movies in those six weeks. But who am I kidding. I'll probably curl up with some crap on Netflix at least every third night. And hope to hit at least two movies in the theater, though where this will occur is one of the many unknowns.

It feels daunting, these unknowns. I've been away from the comforts of home for three weeks, maybe even three-and-a-half. But never this long. What if I forget something?

I'll be fine. They have stores in Europe.

I don't know when my next post will be up ... it might be ten days from now, or I might have WiFi on the plane and write something straight away. In either case, you now have this programming note to explain my absence, however long it may last.