For starters, my wife and I are not a total novices when it comes to foreign travel, but clearly we are not veterans. 30 years ago at the age of 18 I went to Europe for 4 weeks as a High School graduation gift. It was one of the best times of my youth. It was on a student tour and we stopped in London, Paris, Lucerne, Venice, Rome, Florence, Dubrovnik, Athens, and cruised the Greek Islands . I remember Italy being my favorite stop, especially Rome. The trip gave me a desire for foreign travel.
However, it wasn't until almost 20 years later that I was able to travel abroad again. At one point I worked for a French startup company, they were trying to get a foothold in Silicon Valley. It gave me an opportunity to visit Paris on 2 occasions. However, these were not pleasure trips. And you wouldn't call it independent travel. I was generally helped by employees of the Paris office with hotel and transportation. I did discover two things. I could drive with the best of Parisians and jet lag hits me hard. I should note that the Marketing VP of this French company fixed his jet lag by taking sleeping pills and drinking all the alcohol that they would serve on the plane. Yes, he had no problems sleeping on the plane. But for me personally, that's a no go.
While our kids were in High School they both took French. My wife chaperoned 3 trips to France with the High School, I also went along. These trips were tours facilitated by a large tour company where the teacher would create the itinerary and the tour company would make all the arrangements. Here were our trips:
- July 2004 - London and Paris
- July 2005 - South of France including Nice, Cannes, Provence, Perpignan, Toulouse, Pyrenees, Biarritz.
- April 2006 - Normandy, Brittany, Loire Valley, Paris
These High School tours turned out to be trips with several families, not as you might imagine where there are 3 chaperons with 25-30 high School kids. So they were very much family oriented and we found them very pleasurable. Everything is organized for you, the tour guides were very good, and we covered a lot of ground. However, we did spend a fair amount of time on the tour bus, mid to lower end hotel accommodations were chosen for you, and the schedule was set to a quick pace (although this is probably best for keeping adolescents occupied).
Meals are a big deal on a tour. The first tour we took, the meals were arranged ahead of time. These turned out to be crappy affairs served banquet style. Sometimes they were served to us in a restaurant prior to the arrival of any French diners in an empty back room. We changed that on the next two trips. Instead, we picked our restaurants as a group as we went along. It turned out that when you dealt with a local owner and told him you had 15 Americans studying French to feed, he would bend over backwards. We negotiated a volume discount, ate great local cuisine from a local merchant who wanted to impress us. We were also allowed to eat right along side French patrons. When people describe the French as snooty, don't believe it. They are extremely friendly when you meet them on their own terms.
In August of 2007 we went on a family trip that we organized ourselves. The four of us took a 12 day trip to Ireland. It was a great trip, we travel well together and it was more to our liking than a tour. We were able to choose accommodations and activities ourselves. Our time belonged to us. If we wanted to picnic on the sunny cliffside overlooking the western Irish coast, well that is exactly what we did.
In the next post I will list some of the lessons we've learned so far.
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