Ten places I keep coming back to in my head. A Yazidi temple in the Kurdish mountains—the holiest site of a 4,000 year old faith. A 7th century monastery carved into rock, where our group sang the Doxology and heard it come back to us off the stone. A croft above Loch Ness run by the same family for eight generations. A hawk on my glove in Fife. Full list on the blog.

I post this to give you a glimpse into the mistakes I made when planning this trip. I would have gladly paid an expert almost any amount to have avoided most of that and experience a more seamless journey. You can never plan an entirely risk-free or problem-free trip, but you can certainly mitigate most problems.