Day: September 26, 2019

Planning or the lack thereof

Turns out travel blogging is much different when traveling with kids- groundbreaking, right?  If you have tracked any of my old posts from my last forays through Europe, pre-kids, you’ll know that we were pretty vigilant about stopping and updating the blog so that our friends at home could follow along.

This time, stopping at a local Internet cafe to compose a post was not an option with the kids in tow.  Also, there are no longer Internet cafes on every corner in Europe! Smart phones have seemingly claimed another victim.  It didn’t matter though because whenever we had down time I was pretty exhausted from the daily adventures.

Fear not though, dear reader! I’m back home now and these grown-up hacks managed to survive, and thrive, traveling in Europe with small kids for almost two months.  If we can do it, you can!

Are Eurail Passes worth it?

With our departure date now set and our Switzerland stay confirmed with our friend, we could move ahead with filling in the rest of our plans for the trip.  When Jon and I traveled in Europe in 2008 we purchased unlimited travel Eurail passes.  We found them exceptionally useful with the form of traveling we were doing as two childless people.  We hardly had any rooms booked ahead of time and just went where we wanted when we wanted.  We almost never needed advance reservations with these tickets which made them so easy to use, especially when traveling to places where booking in English was more difficult.  There were also a few nights we paid a marginal upgrade fee to secure sleeper cars so that we could travel while we slept (instead of paying for a hostel) and arrive in the morning at our new location.

Because things worked out so well with our previous experience with them, we once again purchased Eurail tickets (kids are free) for 15 days of unlimited travel within two months.  We knew this was probably a little excessive but we wanted to make sure we had the flexibility we wanted with so many unknowns.

Since we were traveling with kids in the summer, unlike as only adults in the spring like last time, I ended up booking all of our accommodations ahead of time.  I tried to get ones that offered “free cancellation” in case we needed to adjust our plans, but I knew the last thing we could handle after a train trip to our location would be dragging our kids around with luggage in tow, trying to find a hotel.

Years before Jon and I had taken the train into Munich, planning to spend a few days exploring the city.  Jon’s great grandmother was German but he had never been there before.  It was meant to be a fun return “home” for him.  What we didn’t count on though was that there would be some huge soccer match being played in the city that weekend.  We tried for hours to locate a hotel that had a room available but it seemed Munich was completely booked solid.  Luckily, with our trusty Eurail passes in hand, we decided to hop back on the train and head down to Innsbruck, Austria for the weekend instead.  We had a fabulous time there and I was so thankful we were able to pivot so easily to doing something else.

This time around with kids, however, we ended up booking the ICE/TGV (high-speed) trains almost exclusively to save time and whining.  These trains have to be reserved ahead of time and there is a sometimes substantial upgrade fee.  The high speed trains are also not included in the standard Eurail package and will entail an upcharge.

We had also planned to take at least one night train, partly for the experience for the kids, and partly to save on hotels.  Unfortunately, we found out after we purchased the Eurail passes that night trains are not really available anymore.  There are some limited options in Eastern Europe, but even then it is rather sparse.  Air travel within Europe has become so cheap that most people hop on a plane rather than spend all night, often bunking with strangers, traveling to a destination.  I can’t say I blame them but I did miss some of the romanticism around traveling by night and emerging in a completely different world– different architecture, different language, different culture.

In the end I would not recommend Eurail travel for families.  Your options for travel are more limited with kids so paying the up-charge for the convenience of the pass is not worth it.  Also, it’s likely that you, like us, will want to book the high speed trains to minimize the boredom factor for the littles, and maximize your time in the cities/towns you are visiting.  Point to point tickets end up being much cheaper.  Make sure you book ahead of time if traveling during July or especially August as all of Europe will be on vacation it seems!  On some routes, especially the high speed ones, the prices go up the closer to the date of departure so keep that in mind also during your planning.

*A side note- if you are planning to travel using Eurail passes they can only be purchased outside of Europe.  You must purchase them in advance, outside of the continent.  Also, make sure you order them with plenty of time to spare because they have to mail you actual hard copy tickets!

Logistics

The first step to preparing to go on our epic trip was to actually decide when we would return. We already had round-trip tickets booked to/from Ireland to attend Jon’s best friend’s wedding.  It was a destination wedding and he and his fiancé had booked a group flight for their 30 guests from Dulles.  We had to get the return date changed before we could decide upon our route or loose itinerary.

Ideally we wanted to change the departure city to somewhere more central than Dublin!  We considered Nice, France which would have allowed us to end with some time on the French Riviera.  We also looked into Paris, Vienna, and Frankfurt as possible departure cities because they would allow us to spend the most time traveling in mainland Europe.  In the end though, Aer Lingus allowed us to change the date of departure, but not the location of departure, so we knew we had to somehow find our way back to Dublin by the end date.

The only other known at the onset of our planning was that we wanted to visit our friend Christine in Switzerland.  I contacted her about our plans and she was enthusiastic that we come.  She had a couple of days off in August, and requested a couple more on top of what was already scheduled so we could have a nice stretch of time together.

Now we could get serious about making our two month adventure with kids a reality!