Tomorrow will be 2 months since we left the US – some thoughts from me on our life of travel:
The coffee and the food. On a trip to Europe 2 years ago, I got hooked on cortados – basically an espresso shot “cut” with a little bit of steamed milk. I found my favorite coffee shops across Bellevue/Seattle that did it well and usually paid $6-7 with tip. Here, you can get good espresso at every restaurant, bar or café, and it’s usually $1-3. I love it. And we’ve eaten some VERY good food (along with some not-so-good).
The walking – helps offset the coffee and the food. I’m really enjoying the walking culture. In London, we walked everywhere – to dinner, to the museums, to the tube station to go places a little further away. It’s so different from our life at home, where you drive everywhere – especially from Yarrow Point because nothing is walking distance there. Since we hit the road, we’ve been changing cities every few days and doing lots of walking to explore each city. I just looked and my max step count is 29,336 (Athens). Even on our chill-out days (at the Four Seasons in the Algarve, for example), when it felt like we just sat around for the day, I still walked more than my average day back home.
Renting places. So (surprise, surprise) I’m a bit of a perfectionist and an optimizer – always looking for the best possible solution/user experience/apartment/shirt/etc. Sometimes this is worthwhile . . . and sometimes it’s a waste of energy and time. I’m learning that for this grand adventure, choosing places to stay falls in the second category. When planning a big 2-week vacation to Europe that takes months of planning and only happens once every few years, it feels more justified to spend hours and hours (ok, days and days) scrolling through hotels and apartments, reading reviews, etc. to find the perfect place (and even then, no guarantees, as we’ve unfortunately learned before). However, when we have to book a new place every 2-3 days, this just isn’t practical. Not to mention that there doesn’t seem to be a high correlation between level of research and satisfaction with accommodation. Online listings and even the reviews can be misleading, so it really feels like a bit of a crapshoot regardless of how much time and effort I put in. I’ve already gotten spun around the axel more times that I’d like to admit on this trip researching accommodations, so I’m working hard to take a different approach – rather than my default approach of finding the best possible option of all the options (and there are nearly endless options between Booking.com, AirBNB, Kayak, etc.), focusing on finding somewhere that meets our criteria, and then just going for it. I think I’ve realized that no amount of research is going to guarantee a perfect stay and accepted that some of the places are going to be duds. And that’s ok. Hopefully more are good than bad, but the tradeoff in time and stress to look at ALL the options every time is just too great and takes away from the rest of this experience. So wish me luck – this is not my instinct, and I’m trying hard to do this better.
The kids are doing great. It sounds like a dream come true to get pulled out of school and just get to travel to cool and exciting destinations for months on end – and it is. But it’s also a dramatic departure from life as they’ve known it until now – all of a sudden, no friends, no school, no schedule or routine. And they’re rolling with it like champs! Now that we don’t have to wake them at 7 for school, we’re finding that they sleep until 10 or 11 (or later), every day – which makes us wonder just how sleep-deprived they’ve been. We’ve been going to a new destination every 3 days or so and doing a ton of walking to explore each location, and they’ve been great. We’re all getting 15,000-20,000 steps per day! Food was been a bit of a rough transition after we left London, but they’ve both been open to trying new things. Spain in particular was challenging, but they both found things they liked to eat – or at least things they were willing to eat. And they loved the food in Italy and and Greece. They get on each others’ nerves and there’s been some bickering and fighting, but given the circumstances they’ve adjusted amazingly well. We sat down at a restaurant the other evening next to a table with two women and ended up chatting with them at the end of the meal. They noted they’d just come from spending time with friends who have 3 kids and NOT excited when we sat down next to them with kids – but then complemented how well-behaved our kids were in comparison. We agree – they’re pretty great!
I love riding trains! By now, we’ve taken trains in England, Spain, Italy and France. They are definitely different country to country, and route to route, but I still love them. It’s so much less overhead than flying – just be on the platform when you train arrives and get on, no need to arrive 2 hours early, no security line (most of the time), no tedious line at the gate, more room to sit and relax, read, look out the window. I just love it!
Wine with lunch. This is a thing they do here, and I am on board with it. Especially a glass of cold white wine after several hours of walking exploring a new city. And white wine is harder to mess up than red, so this has worked in every country so far.
Having a home is nice. I have LOVED being able to do this – what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! We’ve been able to see so many places, try different foods, be exposed to different cultures and languages. But it’s hard work, and I’m getting a little tired. We head back to London in about 2 weeks to look for our apartment there, and I’m really looking forward to it. Although we’ll still be staying in a short-term rental for the week, it’s so much easier because a city that we’re starting to know our way around and know what to expect. And once we do find a place and move in, I’m looking forward to getting to know our new neighborhood – where’s the best coffee, where to take the dry cleaning, the most efficient way to load our new dishwasher (yes, I mean this), exploring nearby parks and generally getting settled.
But until then, we have more to explore – onward!