Planning

So one of the first questions people always ask when we tell them we are going to Europe for a month with three boys is... "How do you plan a trip like that?"  Well, the honest answer is we have absolutely no idea.  We are just sort of making it up as we go along.  The main thing is that we are doing LOTS of reading and studying.  We spend hours every day working on our plan.  Slowly it is all coming together into what we hope will be a very enjoyable and educational trip for all of us.

(When I read other blogs, my favorite part is the photos.  There really are no applicable photos to include in this entry (they would only be photos of Scott and me at our computers!) so I will just include some random photos for fun!)

Last Day of School

We started by having a travel agent help us figure out where to go and how long to stay there.  When we started, all we knew we wanted to do was "go to Europe" and that we had about 4 available weeks.  That was very overwhelming.  She suggested a plan sort of like this:

• London - 7 days
• Amsterdam - 3 days
• Paris - 6 days
• Munich - 4 days
• Venice - 5 days
• Paris - 6 days

After doing some research on our own, we decided to remove Munich and include a driving tour with stops in Germany, Italy, Austria and Liechtenstein.  

The travel agency had some difficulty finding accommodations for the 5 of us with the hotels that they do business with.  When we travel, we prefer to stay in homes that are vacation rentals by owner (vrbo.com).  However, the travel agency could not plan that sort of accommodations.  So we quickly discovered that we would prefer to do our own planning.  And since we are both control freaks, it probably has worked out better for everyone that we have done all our own planning.

Ethan's baseball team won the city playoffs!

So for pretty much every single day since February, Scott and I have worked on the details of our trip.   He found places to stay for each location and let the rest of us pick our favorites.  We are mostly staying in apartments but also a few hotels.  He also arranged the train tickets between destinations (which was a HUGE job).  We divided up the cities and have been working on the daily itineraries for each one.  Scott is doing Paris, Amsterdam and the driving tour.  I am planning London, Venice and Rome.  I have been working on packing (we are taking only one carry on bag each).

We checked out way too many websites to list here.  I also went to the library and bookstores to see what sort of travel books were available.  We were really hoping to find something titled "How to Plan a Month Long Trip to Europe with Boys ages 11, 8 and 6."  Unfortunately, we still have not found that resource!  We independently discovered that we liked Rick Steves' travel philosophy and advice.  We purchased all of his books and CDs and have been studying them diligently.  We have also gotten a lot of fiction and non-fiction books and movies for us to read and watch.  We have included the boys in the whole process and we talk about it constantly.

Scott's birthday

So, in a nutshell, that is how we have planned our trip.  The bad thing is that we will not know if we did a good job planning until it is too late!  Although we have done a lot of traveling, we have certainly never planned anything so extensive or to a place where we do not speak the language!  I guess pretty soon we will know how well we did in our planning.

Trip to South Dakota in June 2010