I will kick this off by calling this trip what it was. As I look back on it, I’m fully aware that we took 3 kids aged 9-13 on a backpacking tour of Europe for 2 weeks. That’s probably a little crazy when you look at it that way. But we did it, it’s done, and in the end we managed to pull it off. Was this a good idea? You can make the argument for “absolutely” and “absolutely not” and I probably can’t honestly debate either answer. However, in the end, we did it, and we had an amazing family trip that we hope will stick with these kids quite literally for the rest of their lives. While the expression, “memories of a lifetime” is surely overused, in this case, I think it’s truly warranted.
This blog post is a reflection on that trip.
The Itinerary
The rundown of the trip breaks down as such:
– Paris, where we landed in a semi-comatose state, 3 nights
– London, 4 nights
– Brussels, just 1 night, barely 24 hours on-location
– Amsterdam, 3 nights
I freely admit that this wasn’t our ideal order, and we’d been looking to start in Amsterdam and end in either London or Paris. As we finished up the trip, I mentioned that the 1 thing I would change is the order we did everything. But airline prices dictate things like this, and when you multiply your flight by 5, you take the cheapest you can get. Going in another direction would have cost us $2000 more in total.
If I had to reorder this, and money were no object, I would go as such:
1 – Amsterdam
2 – London
3 – Brussels
4 – Paris
I know that doesn’t make sense in a geographical view, but it would be the best way to put these together, IMO. Brussels is most impactful post-London, and I think Amsterdam would have been better first and Paris last. London by default goes 2nd.
Reflections in Summary
As I left each location I reflected on it, trying to make sense of what I had just experienced. I think that without question, Paris was the most memorable for me. In a sense this is funny because I landed in such a sleep-deprived state that I asked myself, “Ok, where’s the awesome?” That quickly transformed into an amazing city with a strong fabric, strong culture, and an incredible experience. I still miss the city the most and would go back next week if I could. London was less impressive to me, though again this could be pilot error. As I mentioned in the blog, it seems to pride itself on being the Proletariat Drunk, which isn’t appealing to me with or without kids. Vegas is not a place you should ever try to emulate. Brussels was great, and pound-for-pound was the best city, but that’s unfair. I feel like we saw/did it all in 24 hours and that’s all we needed. Do not set this as your target for a vacation. It’s a passthrough where you can get a great place to stay, great food, and an amazing tour for reasonable prices. Amsterdam suffered from a lot of things, specifically being at the end of the trip as well as not necessarily being a kid-friendly city. As mentioned, I would have started there and gone the other way. Had we done that, I think it would have been better. At the end, Amsterdam is still hard for me to understand entirely, and I would like to go back one day to give it another shot.
The Luggage Situation
I should mention we did all this with just 5 backpacks. In reality, with 5 people and 3 kids, that’s pretty remarkable. That alone is probably a life lesson the kids can hopefully take with them and use for the future. Anyone with kids knows it’s hard to travel in the first place. Going anywhere without the kitchen sink can be stressful. But we dialed it down to the bare necessities and we survived. it. This was all we took:
When we got home Friday I took apart my backpack and this is what it looked like:
In total:
– 4 sets of clothes, 3 of them in the backpack
– Laptop, charger
– Mouse & mouse pad (this is actually invaluable for long-term writing)
– Toiletries bag
– Converter for the outlets
– Passports
– iPhone charger, reading glasses, headphones (2)
– Camera, plus cable to download pics
– Notebook: probably the 1 useless thing I brought with me. I ended up using my iPhone Notes app to keep blog notes after day 1
Improvements?
In hindsight we could have done some things better. Nobody is perfect and if you’re not trying to make things better, it’ll never get better. Here are some things I would change up if we were to do this trip again.
First – the first stop in every city would be a market to buy “stock” food for everyone. Having some fruit and granola bars, etc, would have gone a long way in helping the Food Panic that the end of the trip became. In the last few days, nothing really mattered but food, and that had an impact on the trip. This was our fault, and in hindsight we see that now. Lesson learned.
Second – do a little more legwork on the Airbnb/sleeping arrangements. The 2 Airbnb places we got (Paris & Brussels) were great. We did a glorified hostel in London and it made that stop much less enjoyable. Knowing what I do now, I would put more energy in finding an Airbnb that worked. To be fair, we did try to land 2 Airbnbs in London but both hosts let the request expire. In effect, they were waiting to land a larger party so they could charge more. The whole town is literally mining for cash, all day, every day, and frankly makes me like the city even less. Amsterdam wasn’t as bad but again, much less enjoyable than Paris or Brussels.
Third – maybe having more of a set sleep schedule and trying to ensure the kids get enough sleep every night. By the end, Simon was starting to fall apart every day by 3:00, and this had an impact on both of us because he became 100% hands on unless we gave him the phone, which we tried not to do. Having said that, to be fair, the damn sun sets so late here, it’s impossible to get to bed before 10:00 and in Amsterdam, it didn’t fully set until 10:30. Combine that with the strict hours on many places of 9-5:00 and our hands are tied. We didn’t come to Europe to sleep in so this is a hard one to manage.
Fourth – related to the above, I would build in at least 1 day where we sleep in and do very little structured sightseeing. Call it a reset day. If we had this trip again, I would add in at least 1 of these.
I think those are the main 4, and really #3 & #4 are related. I’m not sure we can address #3 and honestly the next time we do this, Simon will be older, at least 11 I imagine. We will surely go on vacation again next summer, we likely won’t be going on a Europe backpack tour for 2 weeks. So this may be a moot point in 2 years. But a rest day is still not a bad idea. I’m getting old, you know.
Shoes
I think it should be mentioned that about a month before your trip, you should buy new shoes. I do not say this out of experience, at all.
Ok yes I do. My shoes were terrible and while it didn’t ruin anything, I wish I had gotten new shoes 1-2 months before we left because mine were shot and we walked a lot.
Food & Food Costs
What do you get when you take a 2 week tour of Europe, walk 6-12 miles per day, and add 5 stomachs to the equation? The answer is: a very large food bill.
Funny enough, Paris was the easiest place to address this because the bread & cheese are dirt cheap. You can get a block of quality brie for 2 Euro and a loaf or bread for 1. You can get breakfast pasties and a coffee for 8 total. Compare this with Amsterdam, where my coffee shop breakfast was 7 for myself alone. Brussels was also easy to find cheap eats but London and Amsterdam were brutal, and I mean brutal expensive.
I have no answer to the question of how to eat reasonably in either of those 2 cities. But it’s something to be aware of, and when you have the equation lined out above, it’s a consideration you need to take into consideration.
Blogging
Without question, blogging had an impact on the trip and I would be lying if I claimed otherwise. The entire process took 2 solid hours every day, 1 at night and 1 in the morning, if not more. My general process looked as such:
– Pull the pictures from the camera
– Sort 50-100 pictures into 3 categories: blog, not blog, trash (blurry)
– Title page, do excerpt, categories, tags
– Put the notes into the blog page
– Write the first draft of the post
– Post pics to Imgur
– Drop pics, 1 by 1, into post, choose feature image
– Subtitle pics
– Edit post
– Submit, share on Facebook, MTBNJ, then the main Blog Page
Somewhere in there I would sleep, usually between the first draft and the edit. Ideally I write at night then reread it after I sleep. The first few I had to write and edit the morning of, which made the quality less. The full workflow had yet to be worked out but once I got it, that’s how it went. The first few days were more time-consuming.
Without question this whole process had an impact on the trip, like I said. I wouldn’t say “detracted” because we now have this incredibly rich permanent record of an amazing trip. But it did cut my sleep short a hair, and meant that at night it was harder for me to kick back and relax. I did take notes all day, every day which you can say took me out of the moment, but I would argue that it actually made me pay attention far more than I otherwise would have. See the various tour days and the recaps there – specifically Brussels and how detailed that recap is.
Obviously, blogging is something I do and have done for many, many years. So this is always going to be part of any travel I do. Hopefully it is for the better in a grand scheme.
Ranking the Sites
If I were to choose 10 things you should do from this trip, here’s how I would rank them. I will try to pick 2 from each city, then 2 additional ones.
1. Eiffel Tower
2. Tower of London & Tower Bridge
3. The Globe Theater
4. Sandeman’s Free Walking Tour of Brussels & Grand Place
5. Anne Frank House
6. Rijksmuseum
7. Churchill War Rooms
8. Luxembourg Gardens
9. Catacombs of Paris
10. The Shard
10. The Louvre
10. Changing of the Guard & Buckingham Palace
10. Sacre Coeur & Notre Dame & Arc de Triomphe & every bakery in Paris
10. Rock & Roll Walking Tour
Ok so sue me, I can’t pick just 10. And these are not necessarily in order from 1 to 10, though maybe they are a little. Context is very important here. For instance, The Globe and Luxembourg Gardens came with zero expectations, so I loved them both. The Louvre was on a hot-ass day and the place has minimal AC, so it was a bit tougher. Plus not getting any tour at all means we did it wrong, perhaps.
It’s also hard to rank Notre Dame in the top 10 because you just see it. But you can’t go to Paris and not see it. If you go to London, it’s ok to skip the Shard. But you cannot, I mean cannot, skip both Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe. Just not allowed. So in the end I cannot rank them in order, as such.
But #1 is the Eiffel Tower. That one is pretty legit.
The Weather
This isn’t something you can choose, but we got no rain at all while we were there. Not “a little” but none whatsoever. It was hot for 4 of the 12 days, but my experience is that you forget the heat as soon as you’re done with it. It’s better to be lucky than good sometimes?
The Magnets
Here they are, as they stand on the fridge right now:
– Paris – a fairly obvious choice
– London – again somewhat solid pic
– Brussels – kind of wraps up what Brussels was
– Amsterdam – we got this at the cheese museum
– Brussels – at the Tintin store
– Brussels – from the official Tour de France trailer in town
– Amsterdam – grabbed this from the open market
What’s Next?
As this trip wound down we found ourselves looking forward a bit, and we have 3 things to plan for the next 12 months. Currently, we’re going to need to focus on the next 2 trips, which are the long Thanksgiving weekend, then spring break for 2020. We’re thinking maybe Florida for Thanksgiving and perhaps something in Central America for spring break. I’m on an Ecuador push but we will also consider Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama. Thanksgiving may also be a road trip as the flights are expensive at that time of year.
The 3rd is next year’s summer trip for the family which is not on the radar yet.
I find myself looking to possibly put together a Scandinavian tour of Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki one day but I think that will be just the 2 of us. Spain is another option. The EU trio of Vienna, Prague, and Budapest is another candidate for the future and I’d like to do that inside the next 2, maybe 3 years. Rome is something we’ve discussed taking the kids to see, as it would lend itself so a solid family trip. I want to go to Machu Picchu before I die. Germany is a “someday” trip as well. And for reasons I cannot exactly explain, I want to go to Luxembourg City, most likely in the same manner we did Brussels this year.
I reserve the right to change all of these opinions at the drop of a hat. Also, this doesn’t consider Asia at all. But we may backload Asia to when the kids are older and we can start to actually take vacations with just us.
The End
And that’s that. I probably don’t have much more to say but if I don’t stop now, I’ll go on forever. The trip was both long and short, easy & hard. Any trip like this is going to push the edges of what you can take as a family, but in looking back, this was a wildly successful trip, and I think all 5 of us had an amazing time. There were no major setbacks, the kids get along incredibly well, and as mentioned, the weather was nothing short of amazing.
If you are 1 of the approximately 5 people who read all this, I hope you enjoyed it. See you on the next journey, and thanks for reading!
Traveling Normandy 