Europe Spring of 2024

This year celebrates our 30th year of traveling together to Europe. We've always made our own travel arrangements, everything from airline tickets to hotel/apartment reservations to public transportation. Well, this year we've connected up with Byway Travel in the UK. Their specialty is arranging travel by train in Europe. While we took care of purchasing our airline tickets (Delta and Air France), Byway worked up a trip to Catalonia by rail, including booking the hotels and getting our train tickets, all paid for in advance.

So, on 11 April we fly from Grand Rapids to Detroit then on to Paris. After spending a night near the Gare de Lyon we take the TGV direct to Spain. 

OK, so we're actually spending our time in Catalonia: we stop in Girona for three nights then on to Tarragona for three nights, ending in Barcelona for four nights. 

From Barcelona we head back to France and to Bordeaux to meet up with friends Richard and Pauline. After four nights exploring a part of France we have never seen before, we hope to spend a couple of nights at Richard and Pauline's home in Mouchan. 

From there we catch a train back to Paris. We'll spend four nights at an apartment in the 12th arrondissement before returning to the US. 

We have scheduled cooking classes with market trips in Barcelona and Paris, which should be lots of fun and a new experience for us both!

The trip should take about three weeks. 

Byway sent us our Journey Guide (digital) as well as digital paper reservations to print out which would cover our long-distance trains. Our paper Eurail passes will come this week.

On the practical side we will be taking at least one of our sturdy Thule rollers along with a small rolling bag and of course our Thule backpacks, all of which saw good service in 2022.

As for communication, I went for  an eSIM from Airalo. Good for 30 days it will give me 5 GB of data only (no phone number) for $20! We will rely on our normal service for texting, using wi-fi etc. Once we land in Paris I just open the phone, turn the new eSim on and it should connect to a local network. The card works in 39 European countries and should connect to local networks wherever we are in France and Spain. Should be interesting. . . .  I'll be posting about our use of the new eSim throughout the trip.

I'll be connecting with Byway for support on Whatsapp so that will also be new for me as well. I trust it will work out just fine. (I see some of you are smiling at such a notion. . . .)

Stay tuned!

England in April and the Grand Canyon in August but no Italy

Two thousand fourteen was going to be our 20th anniversary trip back to Italy. In June of 1994 we took our first trip abroad together and spent four weeks cruising the backroads of that incredible peninsula, spending a couple of nights outside of Merano before heading south for  a week in a house in Umbertide in Umbria, followed by two weeks in a house in Vagliagli just north of Siena ending up at the Hotel Florence in Bellagio (how prescient the name of that hotel!). It was a defining time for the both of us to be sure.

So, we planned to return to Italy in celebration of that very special time in our lives. But just as that first trip represented an entirely new experience for us and taught us the joys of independent, self-catering holidays, setting the standards for nearly all of our subsequent travels together, next year we plan to try two new things instead of returning to Italy.

First up, we head to the United Kingdom in late April when we'll spend a week traveling the countryside with friends Richard and Pauline. Aside from a couple of short jaunts we usually pass through London on our way to somewhere else. Even the month I spent there in 2005 hardly counts: I was either in class at International House or out in the suburbs (where I lived with a family) doing homework, although you couldn't prove that by my final grade.

Hadrian's Wall

So, we've got our tickets (burning up the British Airways air miles thank you very much) and the plan now is to recoup from jet lag while Richard and Pauline show us around St. Albans, where they call home.  The four of us then climb into their car with packed bags and head north to Northumberland where we plan to explore the Hadrian's Wall National Trail while enjoying the rural English countryside.

The four of us are booked in Fairshaw Rigg Bed & Breakfast in Hexham, not far from the National Trail.

After returning to St. Albans, and depending on weather, we hope to visit Kew Gardens, Highgate Cemetery, and/or the Imperial War Museum, depending on time and weather.

So, right now we're set to spend a week in April in the United Kingdom (the English part).

Our second new adventure is still in the rough planning stage so if anyone has any suggestions or recommendations by all means pass them along. Later in the summer we hope to spend a week circumnavigating the Grand Canyon: South Rim, North Rim, mule trip; the one thing we'll probably skip will be rafting down the river. I'll have more details as we work out the specifics.

Life is short -- and if you can't go to Paris, go somewhere new, somewhere anywhere to let your mind drift, soaking up new experiences and new faces.