I've been back now for three weeks. I'd meant to do this wrap up post sooner, but things have kept conspiring to deny me the opportunity to write this summary. In some ways, it was easier to write while on the trip then after.
Still, here it is. If any of this helps anyone planning a similar trip, you're welcome to it.
Things that worked well
- Renault short-term lease - We leased a new Renault Kangoo for 28 days through Renault Eurodrive. Not only was this very economical ($1747 including taxes and insurance -- even picking up in one country and dropping off in another),
driving also made most of our transfers easy and opened up more destinations for us to visit. The stress and extra time to make trains/planes/busses work for the rest of our stay would have been exhausting.
- Tolls in advance - I used tolltickets.com to obtain
- Austrian highway vignette
- Swiss highway vignette
- Italian TelePass and ViaCard
- French Liber-t
I had them sent to my hotel in Munich and I mailed the TelePass and Liber-t back from a post office in Paris. It was simple and saved tons of time and hassle driving the highways. Highly recommend.
- Having two cameras - It may seem like overkill, but we had two Canon SX260 HS with us with large SD cards -- we got different colors to help keep them straight. Laura and I have different ideas about which pictures to take so both of us having one at the ready helped make sure we captured the moment. Some times we'd split up for part of a day, so two cameras meant not having to choose. Actually, we each had iPhones, too, so in reality, we had four cameras with us. We used them all.
At the end of each day, I'd load all the photos into iPhoto on my MacBook Air, a typical day would have maybe 300 photos. From those, I'd pick the "good" ones and upload those to Picasa, each day, about 100-150 made that cut. Then from those, I would pick some to include in the daily blog post, about 10-30 per day made it there. Sometimes, there'd be things that were better in video. For those, I'd make a short video with iMovie and upload to Vimeo to post in the blog. It took time and some days I really just wanted to punt, but I stuck with it and I know that I would have never finished it if I tried to do it after I got back. - International Roaming Plans - The vast majority of the time, we were using WiFi in our lodging for our data needs. However, there were times out "in the field" where having data, calling or texting available were great conveniences. Exiting a subway in a strange city is disorienting. It's nice to have a device in your had that tells you which way to walk. Google Maps for iPhone worked well for this. But you need data. You need international roaming plans. Sign up for them before you leave and cancel them when you get back. It's easy and you can do it online.
- Staying in places with WiFi - While convenient and a life saver at times, relying on your phone's data roaming can get to be expensive. As you can tell, we stay pretty connected during our travels. It's really a must-have that we have access to WiFi while traveling. Fortunately, that's easy to do since it's very common. But it has reach the point, that we wont stay in a place that does not have it.
- Renting apartments direct from owners - The most satisfying places we found to stay were apartments and flats we rented direct from owners or small-time property managers. It took work to find such places, but internet sites like vrbo.com, flipkey.com, and homeaway.com were good resources. The major drawback is that most of them want to be paid in cash on arrival. It's not that big a deal, but it does take planning.
Bringing our own carseat - It's a minor detail, but taking our own carseat worked out better than I expected. It was beat-up enough that we didn't really care if it got lost. Plus, the airlines let us check it for free.- PrintStik portable printer - I brought a portable thermal printer, a PrintStik by PlanOn. This turned out to be a great thing to have along on the trip. I used it to print
- tickets to climb the tower at Pisa
- tickets for a concert in Prague
- tickets for the Eiffel Tower
It was so liberating to have the option of printing our own little things wherever we were. - Prepaid passes - Before we went I bought Paris Museum passes, Venice museum passes and parking in Venice, tickets for Versailles, tickets for Giverny, tours at Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein ... really, anything I could buy in advance, I did. It was so helpful to be able to skip ticket lines and know that we were going to be able to see the sights we wanted to see.
- Writing in the blog every day - I decided early on that I would write in this blog every day. I gave up the idea of writing something interesting, and just accepted the fact that most of what is written in here is boring. I treated it like a notebook I was writing for myself to remember the trip -- I was just letting other people "look over my shoulder" if they wanted while I was writing it. Some days it was hard, some days I started early and had lots to say. But the best part was that it was there. The rest of the family fell behind on their journal writing and relied on this blog to jog their memories of what we did and saw.
- Cloud syncing apps - I found that often I would make notes on the laptop and want to access them from my phone, and occasionally, vice versa. For those task, I found Apple Notes, Dropbox and Evernote to be great tools. I could look up GPS coordinates or copy contacts down on the computer, and then they would magically show up on the phone when I needed to program the GPS in the car, for example. When mapping out what to do with our time in Paris, day to day, Laura and I even found a shared Evernote notebook to be useful.
- Chase Hyatt chip and signature card - I picked up this card -- it has no foreign transaction fee and has an EMV chip (the system used in Europe). The card worked just about everywhere I needed it to work (except a train platform in Frederikssund, Denmark). I also carried a Andrews Federal Credit Union chip and pin card, but I seldom used it.
- Tours with guides - We paid for some private guided tours in places and it's definitely worth the expense to get a local to zip you through lines and focused on the things you want to see. In Prague, we hired Andrea Řezníčková through Personal Prague Guide. In Paris, we hired a private family bike tour from BikeAboutTours.com and our guide Christian was really good. Yes, you can save money and see the same stuff without a guide, but it will take more of your time. On vacation, time is worth more than money. So, do what you can afford and make the most of your time.
- Electronic books - We gathered quite a Kindle library before we left, and added to it along the way. When you're carrying luggage, you don't want alot of extra weight from books. Electronic books are great! They also occupied the kids on the long car/plane rides. Plus, syncing do my phone meant that I could refer to guide book passages in my Kindle iPhone app without having to lug the guide book around.
- Speaking of apps, there were a couple notable apps that really helped in Paris
- TheFork - a nice restaurant app with reviews, map based search and the ability to make in-app reservations.
- G7 Taxis - this app let you book a taxi or request one and then shows you where you cab is on its way to you.
- Booking.com -- while it has an app, I found the booking.com site to be the most useful. We booked several of our hotels through there and while there certainly were other options, usually when we booked a hotel it was for just a night or two and for those occaisions, like this one in Beaune or this one in Innsbruck, simple and inexpensive, but clean and reserved worked for us.
- Multiple ATM cards - I mentioned above that many places we stayed expected to be paid in cash. Cash was also the preferred and easiest method of payment in restaurants. That's fine, but many ATMs have a 300 EUR limit. Traveling with one card would have made it difficult. I carried four cards from different institutions (Chase, PayPal, Fidelity, E*TRADE) and found that I could get more than enough cash in one shot whenever I needed it. Usually just two cards was enough to get what I needed. It's simple, if you plan ahead.
Things that didn't work so well
Most things worked well on the trip. The one notable exception was
- Tep Wireless MiFi access point - I really wanted this to work. It would have been helpful. I rented one of these pocket wifi devices that was supposed to work everywhere we went. Unfortunately, after the first few days in Copenhagen, it would not work. I contacted the company and they promised to send me new SIM cards twice along the way but never did. It was a very disappointing experience.
I might be willing to try them again because I wanted it to work so much, but I would check on the reviews carefully before trying again.
