Getting closer now

Ok, now it feels real. Doing things like arranging for mail to be held, informing banks of my travel plans, booking tours and shuttles.

I simultaneously feel like I have too much left to do and that the trip will never start. How is that possible.

Just turned off my work email.  Not planning to look at that until I'm back.

I mentioned that I like to plan trips, didn't I?  I also just finished organizing the notes, reservations, directions etc... into color coded folders, arranged by date and location

Yup.  Pretty geeky, but I've found that having it all laid out ahead of time helps me relax during the trip.  Nothing to stress about, just pull out the right folder and there's what I need to know.

Just a little more packing left to do now.

The Plan

I admit it.  I'm a geek and I really like planning trips.  For me, the adventure starts with the first imagining of the journey.  What are we going to see?  How are we going to get there? Where are we going to stay?

A trip like this one can, and did, fill months of planning and research.  We've been involving the kids at various stages. We put up calendars and maps on the walls to make it more real for them.  We watched travel videos together.  We poured over vacation rental sites like VRBO and Home Away and FlipKey and Airbnb.

After countless hours of work, we're within just a few days of launching.  Here's an overview of our trip

Highlights

• flying into Copenhagen
• flying out of Paris
• length of trip: 6 weeks
• includes 21 days of road tripping through Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France

We had to make choices and skip some things:  no Rome or Florence.  We tried to have balance between quiet oases and bustling tourist sights.  Early on, we decided that for the middle part of the trip, renting a car was going to make more sense for our family.  

Trains in Europe work great and I like them, but herding our family of five (son age 14, daughters aged 10 and 6) in and out of train stations carting luggage -- plus the expense and time delays of working out the train connections...  it just seemed easier to drive.  We made arrangements through Renault Eurodrive to rent a Kangoo for 21 days.

There's still lots to do before leaving, but the trip is starting to seem real now.  Before during the planning, it seemed like it was far, far in the future.  Now I'm almost worried I wont have enough time to finish packing...  but that adrenaline rush is all part of the experience.

My plan is to document the trip here in this blog to I can relive it for a long time to come.  Thanks for reading along.