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.