[billnchristy]

I'm starting to plan for next year's vacations even before taking our annual trip. I've budgeted around 15k for the big one, obviously would like to come in under that, but with this year's Iceland trip it's about that much so I figured it's a good start point.

We like nature and history, I'm into military history more but anything cool and old is fine.

I'm former Navy so I have travelled quite a bit but my wife and daughter have not, other than the US and Canada. The Iceland trip will be their first stamp in their passports.

My biggest chunk of time off comes at Christmas, we shut down from around the 22nd to the 2nd so that's the time we can make our big trip. It works out because my wife is UV sensitive and cannot be out in the sun during the summer for very long.

We have our "small" trip planned somewhat already, we are going to go to Charleston SC for a week.

I'm looking for some overseas recommendations for the "big" one, we figure we will tour more of the US when retired since it is cheaper and we wouldn't be able to budget so much then.

I've been to:
Cannes, France
Naples, Italy
Rome, Italy
Trieste, Italy
Palma de Majorca
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Antayla, Turkey
Konya, Turkey
Gaziantep, Turkey
Corfu, Greece
Haifa, Israel
Dubai, UAE
Bahrain
Bad Urach, Germany

We all like castles, I definitely prefer more purposeful ones than fairytale ones.

I'm down with multiple locations but I'm weary of going to crazy because I don't want to lug an ass of luggage everywhere so would probably drive and then it needs to be reasonable, don't want to spend the vacation in the car.

Kinda thinking Belgium but I'd love to see Austria, or Romania, or the Czech Republic too.

Daughter is big on Japan but I fear most of the trip would be wasted with flights and jet lag as we only have about 10 days.

We definitely love good food and we're not "club" people so nightlife isn't a huge concern, but I don't want to be in a place that's dead at dusk either. Probably more "country" than "city" people as well but I always like to spend a day or so walking around a city, just don't want to spend the entire trip there.

For example we have 1 day in Reykjavik planned and when we go to Maine we spend a day in Portland, everything else is outside the cities.

I think of all the places I've been, Rome would be the one I'd go back to but I wouldn't want to spend a whole trip there. I loved Croatia as well but not sure about spending an entire trip there either, would rather be somewhere that we could visit a lot of different stuff.