Nine Weeks in Europe

I’ve been wanting to take my daughters to Europe for a couple of years but have had a hard time deciding where to go between the places that I wanted to take them and the places on their own lists. I have six 2019 European client trips to plan that overlap a lot of the cities already on our list, which made me start thinking more seriously about a family trip that would also allow me to scout for client trips.

When I first realized that it was possible for us to take an extended trip during the school year, our travel plan fell into place pretty easily just by connecting the dots on a map of all the places we’d talked about. I built in a couple of odd zig zags and out of the way stops for specific sites like the Tower of Pisa, but thankfully the train system in Europe makes that easy.

I knew I wanted to start in southern Italy to enjoy it in warmer weather and work our way north to end up in Paris and London for Christmas markets and celebrations.

The cities that we picked for our home bases are places we wanted to visit, but are also located near other countries, cities or islands that we wanted to explore. All in all, we’re hitting nine countries (including day trips to the Vatican City and Monte Carlo) in nine weeks.

To plan a nine-week trip, I started by nailing down our route, then booked flights after comparing a few different arrival/departure dates and locations, made lodging reservations for each city and reserved only a handful of tickets and tours that were likely to sell out (i.e. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in London which is now sold out through February). For the rest of the trip, I added a general plan in my app but knew that we’d need flexibility based on the weather, how we were feeling each day and other things that we discovered along the way. I’m looking a day or two ahead as we go to decide what we actually want to see and do. We won’t be visiting any more churches for a while after what seems like the hundred that we saw in Italy.

Our travel schedule based on the number of nights. ITALY: Naples (1), Sorrento (3), Rome (4), Siena (2), Florence (2), Vernazza (2), Venice (3) FRANCE: Nice (3), Arles (2), Chalon sur Saone (1) SWITZERLAND: Geneva (1), Zermatt (2), Interlaken (4), Lucerne (2) GERMANY: Dusseldorf (3) NETHERLANDS: Amsterdam (3) BELGIUM: Bruges (2), Brussels (2) FRANCE: Paris (6), Bayeux (3) ENGLAND: London (6), Stroud (3), Birmingham (1), London (1)

We’ve spent a couple of entire afternoons so far on our devices or reading and not talking to each other. I knew from the beginning that we’d need some mental breaks to survive nine-weeks of constant togetherness and the stress of living on the go. After two and a half fun weeks in Italy, we’re ready to move on and start the zigging and zagging.