Part 2 – Preparation and Departure

Part 2 – Preparation and Departure                                             

We wanted to keep our itinerary flexible, so we could spend more time in some place if we wanted, and less someplace else if the weather was poor or for some other reason.  However, after more research we decided we really needed to make reservations for lodging in advance, especially since it is difficult to find places with quad, or “family” rooms, and it is much more expensive to get two double rooms for the four of us.  The other advantage is not needing to spend time looking for accommodations – with more time to spend seeing sights.  Before we left home we had booked ~2/3 of our accommodations.  I would have done the rest, but ran out of time before we left, and will do the rest as time permits along the way.  I used a mixture of booking.com and local tourist information web sites to book our accommodations which range from traditional hotels, apartments, bed and breakfasts, a converted monastery, and even a log cabin in a remote location in Norway.  Locking down our schedule was also important as we will be visiting relatives in Netherlands & Sweden, and some friends in Germany and needed to give them firm dates when we would be there.

Leaving home for 10 weeks requires a lot of preparation that you don’t normally need to do for a short trip.   While most of our bills are on auto pay, there are some that we don’t have that option for, so we needed to make arrangements for those to be paid.  We also had to make arrangements for our yard to be taken care of, fish to be fed, arrangements for mail, suspend garbage service, change car insurance to reflect vehicles not being driven while we are gone, …   We also had to contact the bank and credit cards to provide travel notifications so our cards would work while we were traveling.  Unfortunately, some of them only allow a notification to last for up to 30 days, so we will have to contact them 2 additional times while we are traveling to tell that that we will still be gone.  L   So far (it is several days into the trip as I am writing this section) we have not thought of anything major that we have forgotten.

I want to thank both of our parents and numerous friends for providing suggestions of places to go or stay, or for other travel suggestions.  I also want to thank Karen’s parents for taking us to the airport (and hopefully picking us up), my mom for getting our mail and being on the lookout for bills we forgot about, and my sister and her family for taking care of our house and yard while we are gone.

Day 0 – Sunday, June 16

Final day at home – lots of little things still to be done, but at least the list is getting smaller and we are mostly packed.  We are flying out of Portland at noon on Monday to Seattle, and then from Seattle to Reykjavik and Reykjavik to Paris on Icelandair.   When I tried to check in online I got some added stress that I didn't need.  I was able to check in for the Icelandair flights, but not the domestic flight to Seattle.  When I called the airline they told me that we did not have a valid itinerary, and that Icelandair had rescheduled us on a later light to Seattle but neglected to reissue the ticket.  Icelandair had not notified us that they had put us on a later light to Seattle.  By the time I found this out all I could get was a recording at Icelandair – no 24 hour customer service.  So, went to bed not knowing if there was even space for us on a flight to Seattle as all the flights appeared to be full when I did a web search for Portland to Seattle flights for Monday morning or early afternoon.

Day 1 – Monday, June 17.  Departure day.  Got up early at 5:30 to call Icelandair and resolve the issues with our Portland to Seattle flight.  Extremely rude service representative.  Icelandair insisted that they did not need to reissue the tickets and said we should just go to the airport and everything would work out fine.  After explaining several times that we had been told multiple times that we would not be able to get boarding passes until Icelandair reissues the tickets they finally agreed to reissue the tickets, and I was able to check in for the other flight about 30 minutes later.  It all worked out, but I really didn't need the extra stress and time to resolve the issue as we were trying to get everything else done.  If you don’t already do so I highly recommend checking in online for flights 24 hours in advance to allow time to work through issues like this.  Likely it could have been worked out at the airport, but I spent more than 2 hours on the phone to resolve the issue, and if it took that long at the airport there was no way we would have made our flights, not to mention that we had no clue they had scheduled us on a different flight until we tried to check in. The flight to Seattle was uneventful and a couple of hours later we were off to Reykjavik on our second flight.

Day 2 – Tuesday, June 18.  Continuation of travel day.  Arrived in Reykjavik at 7 AM local time.  Had a layover of only ~45 minutes which was just time to go through immigration and make it to our departure gate by the time they started boarding.  We went through immigration in Iceland as that is where we entered the Schengen agreement area, so no need to show our passports again until the end of the trip as all the countries we will be visiting are part of the Schengen Agreement which allows free movement between borders.  The downside is we only get one stamp in our passports.  L  

Part 1 - Introduction            
                                           

One of the best benefits working at Intel is that we get an 8 week sabbatical every 7 years.  Adding vacation to the sabbatical gives an opportunity to take up to 3 months off.  For my third sabbatical we decided as a family that we wanted to take a 2+ month trip to Europe.  I became eligible for sabbatical in August 2011, and we had had planned to take our version of “European Vacation”, driving through Europe in the summer of 2012.  However, when my dad was diagnosed with cancer in the summer of 2011, we made the easy decision to postpone the trip, wanting to be at home to provide support to my parents. 

In the fall of 2012 we decided that we would take the trip in 2013, starting right after the kids got out of school in June and returning home a few days before school resumed in September.  We started to add some detail to our planned trip beyond “visit Europe for 2+ months”.  We put up a large laminated map of Europe on the wall in our breakfast nook and started marking places we wanted to visit with dry erase markers.  We ended up with way too much for the amount of time we had, so after much discussion we deferred some of the places we wanted to go, primarily southern Europe and the British Isles for a future trip, and mapped out a general route that we would take, a large clockwise loop starting and ending in Paris, going north from France through Belgium and the Netherlands, weaving our way up through Scandinavia, down south through the Baltics, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, before zigzagging our way back to Paris.  All together the plan was to cover 19 countries in a little over 10 weeks, driving ~7000 miles (w/o side trips).   We would visit the following countries:  France, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and Luxembourg.  Our planned route is shown below.

This blog is provides a summary of our adventures on this “once in a lifetime” trip, documenting some of the details so friends and family can follow along, and so we can remember what the more that 10,000 photos we will take are from.  J.  A couple of weeks before we left home our family watched National Lampoon’s European Vacation.  I am sure we will have some issues on our trip, and will look like “stupid tourists” at times, but hopefully we will have fewer issues than the Griswolds did on their trip.