I’ve skipped a lot of countries since my last post about Kenya (posted from Nepal), but I thought it would be nice to make a quick one here from Tokyo since Japan will be our last country in Asia. What follows is mostly logistics, but I still plan to add some more narrative posts (including rollups of my Instagram posts) of the countries we’ve already left.
We arrived here a week ago, and after visiting Sapporo and Tokyo are heading tomorrow to Takayama. From there, we’ll continue onward to Hiroshima and Kyoto before catching a flight to Cairns, Australia in another 8 days or so. Then, we’ll have a week split between there and Melbourne before continuing onwards for two weeks in New Zealand.
Iconic backdrop, but the Sapporo Beer Museum was nothing to write home about. We sped through in order to grab some lunch.
After New Zealand, we fly to Chile, and will travel in South America until we fly back to the US, probably in late May.
That’s looking forward. Here are all of the countries I’ve skipped since that last post about Kenya:
Uganda
Rwanda
Egypt
Israel
Jordan
UAE
India
Sri Lanka
Nepal
Thailand
Laos
Vietnam
Cambodia
Singapore
Malaysia
Brunei
Philippines
Taiwan
With that, our country count is as follows:
43 countries so far, total
Me: 73 countries (including 44 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 75 countries
Henry: 56 countries
Charlie: 52 countries
James: 49 countries
P.S. I was thinking of this song when I wrote that title, but maybe you prefer this other one.
We started this trip with a rough plan of spending about 3 months total in Africa and the Middle East after about 3 months in Europe. As I shared before, we ended up with closer to 4 months in Europe, but were still interested in spending more time in Africa if we could figure it out.
Surprisingly to a lot of people, Africa is the most expensive part of the world we’re visiting. It’s counterintuitive because of the concentration of poverty in Africa compared to the rest of the world: almost 2/3 of all of the people in the world living in extreme poverty (less than $1.90/day) live in Sub-Saharan Africa. That’s 39% of the population compared to less than 9% within the world as a whole. Here’s a graph from the World Bank showing how this has changed over the last 30 years:
Regional trends of extreme poverty ($1.90/day or less), measured in millions of people per region from 1990-2019. I’m focusing on Africa here, but I’ve always been inspired by how much the East Asia and South Asia lines have dropped, driven by the phenomenal growth China has experienced since the 1980s and India since the 1990s.
What that means for travelers is it’s harder for us to find food and services up to our standard of expectations, and we have to pay more to do so. If Karen and I were by ourselves, we’d be willing to take a few more risks, but we tend to play it a little safer since we’re thinking about our kids as well. (We want them to like traveling internationally.)
In other words, it’s cheaper to go to France than Kenya, where there aren’t anywhere near as many international tourists and budget hotels and tours catering to them. Instead, the market is more heavily focused on wealthier people looking to do “once in a lifetime” safari trips, who are willing to pay several hundred dollars a night (or more!) for the opportunity.
Pre-kids, Karen and I spent about half a year living in South Africa and were happy to rent a car and drive around there and in neighboring countries, but Kenya and the rest of East Africa seemed more challenging from the bit we’d started to read from guidebooks. We have a budget we’re trying to follow, though, so I started piecing together an itinerary one location at a time, starting with a budget lodge near Maasai Mara, the most famous reserve in Kenya, and hoping we could figure out the logistics and next steps as we went.
Luckily, the lodge I picked (because it was only $100/night for a family room!) was tied to a great tour operator as well. When I emailed to ask only about game drives locally, the helpful woman on the other side of the “info” email address offered up a couple of tour packages for touring Kenya that were only about 50% higher than our normal daily budget. We were lucky to have found Kairi Tours & Safaris in this way, because we had a great time! (I should also point out that Elizabeth, the woman answering that email, was incredibly helpful and patient–our Gmail thread for planning the trip eventually hit 48 total messages!)
Recovering in Nairobi
So, a couple of months after planning this trip, we finally came to Kenya. After a long couple of days of travel (an overnight ferry from Crete to Athens and a stopover in Istanbul), culminating in a 3:30am arrival in Nairobi, we planned a couple of rest days before starting our real trip. We were lucky to find this Airbnb farmhouse cabin in a fancy suburb of Nairobi:
You can see a dog and chicken here, but here’s my Instagram post with a little more of the local “wildlife”
Our second day also included a visit to the awesome Giraffe Centre, which was small, but provided this up close and personal experience of giraffe tongues, which are pretty dry:
Travel to Maasai Mara
Our view of the Rift Valley, about an hour outside of Nairobi
After our time in Nairobi, we met our driver/guide, James (pictured at the top of the post with our James), who picked us up in the morning and expertly navigated us through traffic and then some very bumpy roads to our lodge on the outskirts of the reserve. We then went for a short sunset drive of the camp, where we took in the great views, spotted impala, buffalo, gazelle, and guinea fowl for the first time, and got excited for our full-day drive the next day. (We also spotted a python, but my family hates snakes and tries not to talk about that!)
Here’s my Instagram post about everything we saw that next day. James did a great job talking to other drivers and peering through binoculars to find as many great animal sightings as possible. It was excellent!
Behind the scenesSleeping lion selfieThat’s Tanzania in the distance
Crescent Island/Lake Naivasha and Lake Nakuru
African traffic jam
We left the next morning (across the same bumpy roads) for a day that was mostly driving north so we could visit Lake Nakuru National Park the following day. However, we had a lovely couple of hours in the afternoon visiting Lake Naivasha, where we spotted some hippos and birds before stopping at Crescent Island, a private, walking only, little reserve where the boat dropped us then picked us up at the other end of the “crescent”.
We were having a pleasant walk at the island, ambling along and not seeing too much when a guard came hustling over the hill towards us. I was worried we were doing something wrong until he said, “do you want to see giraffes?!”
No giraffe viewNow with giraffes. Helpful guard on the right!
After the lake, we traveled a bit further to the Lanet Matfam Resort, which served our favorite food of the trip. It was well seasoned, but also was quite obviously fresh. Here’s a turkey that was wandering around the parking lot:
Taken less than an hour before we ate it.
One thing we liked about the Lanet Matfam as well as the Sweet Lake Resort, where we stayed the next night, was that they weren’t secluded resorts with only western tourists. In fact most of the other guests were Kenyans. I felt underdressed at Sweet Lake because there was some kind of business conference there that all the other guests seemed to be attending. I said at the top of the post that the tourist infrastructure wasn’t as developed as we were used to, but in Kenya at least, we learned that isn’t exactly true.
The day after the drive from Maasai Mara and visiting Crescent Island, we spent 5-6 hours at Lake Nakura park, which was notable for the large numbers of rhinos and the namesake lake stocked full of flamingos and other birds. You can see pictures in the second half of this Instagram post (which also includes Lake Naivashu and Crescent Island):
The following morning, we spent a couple hours riding bikes in Hell’s Gate National Park before a 6-7 hour drive to the South of Kenya for Amboseli National Park, in the shadow of Mt Kilimanjaro. This last day was the most expensive part of the trip, both because of the added park fees ($225) and our most expensive lodge, but we were excited to see one of the most famous mountains in the world, even though we were skipping Tanzania where it was actually located.
Hell’s Gate, right before we surprised three hyena eating a zebra. Thankfully, they ran off! (Picture includes my whole family if you count the fact that our James stayed in the 4×4 with driver James because he didn’t want to ride. The road was quite bumpy, so he was happy with his choice.)From the Sentrim Amboseli, which was the only place we stayed that had only western tourists. Big buffet spreads, though.The famous mountain. Driver James tracked this elephant family for 30-minutes or so in order to get us the picture you see at the start of this next Instagram post:
And that concludes our safari trip. After the whole morning at Amboseli National Park, James shuttled us back to Nairobi where we had another couple of nights relaxing at our Airbnb farmhouse before flying onwards to Uganda. On the day in-between, Karen, James, and I made a return trip to the Giraffe Centre for a little more giraffe feeding and also visited the excellent Karen Blixen Museum. We had a wonderful time in Kenya, and with the excellent introduction to the region were feeling confident about being a little more independent in Uganda and Rwanda.
Coffee roasting machine at the Karen Blixen Museum. The neighborhood we stayed in Nairobi, “Karen”, got it’s name from this Danish transplant, who tried to run a farm after an unsuccessful marriage brought her to Kenya. You might know her as the author of her memoir “Out of Africa”, which became a Best Picture-winning film with Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.
Stay tuned for a next post about Uganda and Rwanda, which will hopefully come a lot faster than this one!
Country counter after Kenya:
24th country of our trip
Me: 63 countries (including 37 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 63 countries
Henry: 37 countries
Charlie: 33 countries
James: 30 countries (he’s kind of a fancy 8-year-old, averaging greater than 3 per year!)
One last short post to finish the European leg of our trep, covering our time in Italy, Tunisia (not in Europe!), and Greece. Again just linking to the Instagram posts I made for these countries, which were shared previously on Instagram or Facebook.
21st, 22nd, and 23rd countries of our trip Me: 62 countries (including 37 eating McDonald’s) Karen: 62 countries Henry: 36 countries Charlie: 32 countries James: 29 countries
Another short post covering our time in Berlin, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Again just linking to the Instagram posts I made for these countries, which were shared previously on Instagram or Facebook.
19th and 20th countries of our trip Me: 60 countries (including 35 eating McDonald’s) Karen: 60 countries Henry: 33 countries Charlie: 29 countries James: 26 countries
Another short post covering our time in Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Bulgaria. Again just linking to the Instagram posts I made for these countries, which were shared previously on Instagram or Facebook.
Just a short post covering our time in Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia. I’m not going to give a full narrative, but am instead just linking to the Instagram posts I made for these countries. (If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you’ll have seen these before!)
I’m writing this post from the airport in Istanbul–just a few miles from the Bosporus Strait that demarcates the border between Europe and Asia. After 118 days of travel, all in Europe except for a week in Tunisia, it’s time to see more of the rest of the world.
As we started this trip, our rough goal for a year was 3 months each in Europe, the Middle East & Africa, Asia, and South America. We kind of accidentally committed to almost 4 in Europe when we bought a 3 month Eurail pass: the price for 3 months over 2 was minimal and then we made plans without rail for a couple weeks before using the pass and a couple weeks after. The Eurail app, which has housed our tickets for this whole time gave me a helpful summary of where we’ve been with both stats and a map:
That’s a lot of time on trains! Also, 7 ferries, some buses, and 5 flights.This captures most of the trip, although it’s weird that some of the lines are a lighter color than others. It misses, of course stops in Sweden, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Tunisia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzogovina, and Greece that we did by car/ferry.
Anyway, those are the stats. Here are a few more reflections now that we’ve been traveling for almost a third of a year.
There’s not enough time
Which I’m embarassed to say while taking a sabbatical year, but it’s true. The greatest unplanned time suck has been planning our future travels, typically at least a couple of months in advance. Karen and I didn’t use to travel that way, but everything is more complicated now. It’s not really the fact that we have kids but rather that there are 5 of us. That leads to two big consequences:
Airbnbs are almost always better and cheaper. (At least in Europe! We’ll see about the rest of the world.) Our places have typically been fine and often great, but the market for Airbnbs gives you better places when you book earlier and better prices when you stay longer. We’ve been erring more on the side of 3-4 day instead of 1-2 day stays for the latter reason.
Transportation is expensive. I’ve been driving rental cars much more often than I expected for this reason. Last week, we paid $120 round trip for four of us to go three hours each way to Delphi from Athens. A rental car would have run us around $50, but we decided the stress of getting and returning a day rental on top of 6 hours of driving on windy roads made the extra cost worth it. When we do want to take taxis, our family typically requires two, which adds an extra level of stress when there’s always a chance the driver won’t understand where we’re going. In Sofia, Henry and I took a first taxi from the airport and Karen’s driver couldn’t figure out where to go. Luckily I was able to call her phone and have my driver talk to hers. If we instead try to get a “big taxi”, that’s often luxury priced. For this reason, one of our biggest expenses in Tunisia was the van I hired to drive us to and from El Kef from Tunisia.
Besides planning time, we’ve also found the need to pause both for general rest days and to give the boys time to do schoolwork, which also needs to be planned. I’d say we’re still trying to find the balance of how to incorporate enough rest time in our schedule while not feeling like we’re missing an opportunity to see and experience things. “We didn’t come all the way to Athens just to sit in our apartment”, is definitely something I’ve said.
Finally, to navel gaze a bit, I thought I’d have more time to blog, writing a post every week. That clearly isn’t working, so for the rest of the trip, I’ll probably continue to rely on Instagram to capture quick thoughts for every country and probably do fewer of the very long posts than I was able to make up through Switzerland.
We’re really lucky
I’m mostly pointing out challenges above, and it’s true that a lot of hard work goes into this trip. I should make it explicit, though, that we’re having a great time. So far the standout locations for most of the family have been Bulgaria, Greece, Berlin, and Estonia. Almost everywhere else has been solid too, although Karen has gotten sick all three times she’s visited Italy and has let me know I’ll be going without her if I ever want to go again. (The kids have been instructed that if they get married in Italy, their mother will not attend.)
Besides a goal of teaching the kids just how big the world is, we also planned on this trip to get more time together as a family. The original idea was pre-COVID, which gave most families too much time together, but I’m happy to say we still like each other and have (obviously) been able to enjoy that extra time. It might be hardest on our teenager, but he finds respite by ducking his nose into books whenever he gets a chance.
Google is Great
Speaking of our teenager, from China to Scotland over 13 years, the tongue still comes out of his mouth.
After we were hiking in Scotland, Google Photos helpfully sent this reminder of the many years of silly pictures I’ve been taking with Henry. This is joyous and silly, but Google as a whole makes this entire trip so much easier than it would have been during our seminal backpacker days at the turn of the century. It’s almost hard to enumerate the many ways in which this is true, but I’m going to try in this post.
Phones/connectivity. Like the taxi example above, this is really helpful for me and Karen, but also for texting the boys if we step out for a bit. (James and Charlie have Google Voice numbers on their wifi only phones and love to use them to text us.) Google takes a bit of a knock here because they just turned off our Google Fi data service because “it was designed for primary use in the United States”, but we’ve figured out how to buy data coverage for our phones in other ways.
Directions and mapping. We would have gotten lost so many more times had we not had Google Maps in the rental car. Also, it’s great for finding a hotel or Airbnb right after you arrive in a new city.
Local tips and reviews. This is mostly a Google Maps feature too–we used to use guide books much more to plan our activities in a given city, but now we mostly use the reviews on Google Maps if we want to plan out a restaurant.
Transit purchases. Frequently you can just buy your transportation tickets in an app that stays on your phone. Even if you can’t, Googling how a city’s transport system work is something I do at least once a week.
Email/Chrome/Accounts. This has been super useful on the homeschooling side of things because I can use each of the kids’ accounts to setup assignments for them by logging in as them from my computer. Really nice.
Photos. Besides the fun reminders like the one above, it’s been great to have all of our pictures backed up from our phones as soon as we get to wifi.
Research. Another area where guidebooks are now less useful–finding random blogs about our destinations has been a great source for planning our daily activities
I’m sure there’s much more I could say, but we’re got to get going to our flight to Nairobi soon. One quick shoutout to the Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card, though. It has an enormous $550 annual fee, but they reimburse $300 of that on travel purchases (which we obviously have!) and then give you points for other travel purchases that amount to about 6% back on every travel expense. For us, though, the best part right now is it comes with lounge access at hundreds of airports around the world:
Better wifi, free food, better place to sit. Yes, please, especially when you get an 8 hour layover
I’ll end with our travel stats as we leave Europe:
23 countries on our trip so far (not counting Turkey, which is too big a place to let the airport count)
Me: 61 countries (including 35 eating McDonald’s)
Karen: 61 countries (we’re tied! She’ll probably pull ahead of me when we hit South America)
If you had the choice to live anywhere in the world, where would it be? Karen and I love Chicago and it continues to be our pick for our home country. We’ve also lived in Melbourne, Australia, and it frequently rates at or near the top of this list by the Economist Intelligence Unit of the world’s most liveable cities.
Another city always near the top is Zurich, Switzerland. As we were planning this part of our trip, all of Switzerland was going to be via our rail pass while staying 15 minutes across the border in France: we couldn’t afford the price of the Airbnbs and hotels there. (The country is expensive for non-residents, but locals receive a lot of services for the high taxes they pay, so it’s easier to live in Switzerland than to visit.)
My friend Dom, though, lives in Zurich and is absolutely passionate about his hometown. We were hoping to meet up for dinner, but when he and I realized that his family were going to be on vacation when we passed through, they very generously offered to let us stay in their central Zurich apartment while they were away. He also made it his mission to ensure we left loving his city as well. As you’ll see, he was definitely successful!
This is Dom. He’s very cool and we know each other from grad school. I don’t have a picture of her, but shout out also to his wife who agreed to our accomodation just a few weeks after having their second baby. (They were away, with grandparents, on a “baby holiday”.)
Travel to Zurich and our first day
In order to make our way from Betzdorf to Zurich, we had to catch an early train to Cologne, then another along the Rhine to Basel (where we were originally going to stay on the French side of the border) and then finally onward to Zurich.
Cologne to Basel train. Quite nice, except for one exception described below.Some riverside vinyards along the RhineA small town along the RhineMore Rhine scenery from the train
It was a long-ish day, but we were looking forward to getting to Dom’s place by 5pm or so. However, that didn’t happen: right at the end of our second train, we discovered that the bathroom locks stick. Charlie learned this by getting locked inside a few minutes before we were due to exit at Basel before the train continued on in the wrong direction. Frantically, I tracked down a conductor, harrassed her to rush to our rescue by unlocking the door with a special key, and then rushed the whole family off the train just as we reached the Basel stop. Whew, crisis averted!
Except, of course, in my haste I failed to realize that we got out at the “Basel France” stop and not the “Basel Switzerland” stop that was coming 5 minutes later–the one with our connecting train. Luckily there were another couple of trains we were able to take, but that little slip left us almost two hours later in arriving to Zurich than planned. (Ironically, Basel, France was where we’d initially planned to stay prior to learning of Dom’s offer.)
Otherwise, things were great! We were able to follow Dom’s instructions to get into the apartment, I bought a bunch of groceries (Dom also advised us to skip the expensive restaurants and cook for ourselves), and even had time to finish reading Harry Potter 5 to James before bedtime:
The balcony was both lovely and saved the rest of the family from having to hear my reading voices. We’re hoping to get through books six and seven by the end of December.
The next day’s highlights were (for me) my morning run along Lake Zurich and then swimming in the lake after a short walk from Dom’s apartment:
It was a little muggy, but one of the prettiest runs I’ve been able to do on this trip. Highly recommended.Google tells me “Young since 1976” is a bakery, but I took a picture of the sign during my run since it’s the year I was born.Easy beach access from a popular park.You can’t really tell here, but it was pretty crowded–the Sunday before Swiss National Day. Still plenty of room for us, though.Also not depicted (until later in the post) are the ducks Charlie kept trying to swim with. He also jumped off that pier a lot.
Walking around this beautiful town
For our second day, we did a walking tour, again thanks to Dom, who sent this wonderfully detailed set of instructions. I’m adding it all here in case anyone else who reads this happens to be visiting Zurich and wants to follow it (which I’d recommend!)
Recommended tour from my apartment: head west toward the lake, stroll north along the lake shore to the opera house, cross Sechseläutenplatz,
Here’s the lakeshore near the fountain. We weren’t sure if we could feed the swans until we saw a few other people doing it.Which is great, because Karen had brought bread for exactly this purpose.More swans. Shout out also to my brother Andy who, for Christmas in 2019, gave the whole family “Niksch/Migneault World Tour 2020” t-shirts to track our family’s travels around the world. Here’s Charlie rocking the shirt, even though it took a couple years longer than planned to get going. Thanks, Andy!Since it was shady and we were enjoying the swans, we also made a little picnic lunch here.The fountain in SechseläutenplatzIt was hot that day!
grab a cup of coffee to go at Vicafe, continue north and head into the old town (make sure to take Oberdorfstrasse), walk all the way to Mühlegasse, then cross over Rudolf Brun Bridge (Option: continue until Central Square and then take the Poly-Bahn up to the terrace of the ETH main building, from which there’s a great view over the city; there are also stairs),
This is the heart of the twisty old city of ZurichIt was shady, but the boys were still glad to have wet themselves down in the fountain! (There were also a lot of hills and stairs to walk up!)The east bank of the river.And the west bank.I think this is Karen in the process of taking the prior picture.And this is Charlie wondering why I’m either (a) taking his picture or (b) we’re stopping to take so many pictures in the heat.
buy an overpriced souvenir at Heimatwerk store, backtrack 5 meters and go down the steps in front of the Heimatwerk store, continue and find the steps up Lindenhof,
I’m not sure if all of these pictures were from before or after the Heimatwerk store (we skipped the souvenirs), but we did climb up some steps!
go down on the other side and continue to Münsterhof, head west to Paradeplatz, go to the Sprüngli store and buy some overpriced macarons, walk south along Bahnhofstrasse toward Bürkliplatz (optional: buy a snack at John Baker’s),
At this point, the boys were hot so we opted for soda/beer over macarons, although Dom was disappointed in how overpriced and touristy our choice of venue was:
I’m not sure what that face is for. His Sprite was about as big as my beer.
from Bürkliplatz take the boat to Zürichhorn or Wollishofen (depending on mood; if you do go to Wollishofen, have a snack or a drink at Rote Fabrik) and end the day at Badi Tiefenbrunnen or Badi Mythenquai.
We started the walk planning to go swimming as described here (at the “badis” or swimming areas with facilities along the coast), but everyone prefered to relax at the end of the day, so we stayed in for the night, watching our second of three movies. We did catch some fireworks for Swiss National Day from the balcony, though!
Some gardens and a view
For our last full day in Zurich, we visited two great sites. First, the botanical gardens, run by the University of Zurich, which Charlie is now very curious about attending. Here are some photos, sans captions:
For the second half of the day, we took a couple of buses up to the “tall hill” of Uetliberg which overlooks the whole city. It was a beautiful view, but when I suggested we hike the way down, I don’t think I realized just how steep it was. Let’s just say that everyone was happy to make it down and we survived with only a few frayed nerves and just one bruised tailbone:
Beautiful train to Innsbruck
So that was Zurich! Like I said, we loved it and Charlie plans to investigate college options in the future. We’re very greatful to Dom and his family for being great hosts in absentia and for providing us with such a great list of suggestions for what to do.
I can’t end, though, without showing a few pictures of our view from the train as we left Zurich and continued on to Innsbruck, Austria. Simply stunning. (The last picture is less about the view and more to capture evidence of our crossing through the tiny country of Liechtenstein. We usually only count a country if we actually spend time there, but it’s so small that we figure this makes the list.)
(Karen did a better job of capturing Liechtenstein itself. I merely captured her capturing it!)
With that little bit of a cheat, here’s our country count up to this point:
11th and 12th countries of our trip
Me: 58 countries (including 33 eating McDonald’s) (no new additions except for the +1 McD)
Karen: 56 countries (first time to both for everyone else!)
The term “Low Countries” is used to describe three countries in Europe that have most of the land area below sea level: Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. (When I was in school, we called them the “Benelux countries”, but I heard more people call them the low countries there.) Ironically, because all of the mountains to the east of these “low countries” make travel times longer than they looked like they should be on a map, we couldn’t figure out how to include Luxembourg in our trip without too much travel. Instead, after Belgium, we opted to go from Amsterdam to Northwest Germany where Karen spent summers as a child and where a couple of her aunts still live.
This post will be heavier on pictures and lighter on words because I’m trying to catch up a little on the blog since I’m over a month behind.
Belgium
Our last couple of days in France were in the middle of a historic heat wave, and the trend continued the next day as we took a couple of trains to Bruges, Belgium. With temperatures at or above 104 degrees Fahrenheit, we didn’t feel like doing much besides hiding in the shade and catching a movie at our Airbnb. The only pictures anyone in our family took were two like this from Karen of the canal near where we ate lunch:
She’s currently planning to get a duck to go with our chickens when we get back to Chicago.
In addition to the duck pictures, James did have a few pictures on his phone for the day, but they were like this:
Everyone in the family besides me frequents this boredpanda site when they’re killing time. Because James and Charlie don’t have wireless data on their phones (only wifi), they’ll sometimes save a few articles to look at on travel days.
Charlie was looking over my shoulder as I wrote this and has requested that I now share his two favorite recent memes. He likes dogs:
Thankfully, the heat wave broke after our first night in Bruges and we were able to see the city starting the next day. Here are some pictures we took during our walking tour:
Family photo! Isn’t my family beautiful?Same spot minus the family. Bruges is also beautiful. Another canal, one of many.Famous belgian waffle dough modeled by our tour guide Pascal. (He happened to be Dutch, but had been living in Bruges for about 5 years and we thought he did an excellent job.)One thing we learned from Pascal is that this famous “Lovers Bridge”, prized place for romantic pictures, was actually made from tombstones robbed from a nearby graveyard. Bruges went from being a wealthy trading center to a dirt poor backwater when their river access to the ocean silted up. It remained that way until people realized it was spectacularly beautful and tourists might enjoy visiting.Right behind that bridge was this opening for toll guards to raise a chain across the river in order to force boats to pay a toll. James and Charlie are wondering if they could start up the business again.View from the Half Moon Brewery tower with famous clock tower in the middle.Also shared by our guide: the location of the best Belgian Waffles in all of Bruges. If you’re ever there, visit “Arlecchino by John- Gelato & Waffles”Henry likes themSo does James. If you’ve never had them before, what’s special is the extra sugar in the dough, which carmelizes on the outside, giving a sticky/sweet exterior while still staying soft on the inside.Here we are on the second day. We went back three days in a row. John definitely recognized us and asked us how our trip to Ghent was when we came back on the third day.Final Pascal recommendation: the Beer Museum! I got to “sample” 4 different beers for $10 and he gets a free beer for every 4 tourists who show up. I got a cherry and then a dubbel, tripel, and quad, so four samples was quite a lot by the end of it. (Percent alchohol of about 4.5%, 7.5%, 9%, and 11%.)
Our second day in Bruges, we split up a little with Karen touring a museum, Henry sitting on a bench to sketch, and me, James, and Charlie taking a tour of the Half Moon Brewery. Here are a few pictures of the day.
Even though Belgium is famous for its beers, the brewery was the only one that actually operated inside of Bruges proper. They had a lot of items on display like this with the old materials they used, but everything had since been replaced with more boring and modern vessels and pipelines.Speaking of modern, our tour guide was exceptionally excited about the pipeline they’d constructed to bring the beer from the downtown brewery to the bottling site 3km outside of town. (That saved them from having to truck stuff through the non-truck-friendly streets.) From the graphic above, you can see it has 5 smaller pipes inside the main containing pipe. Rumors exist that some of the pipes stop at bars and private homes for tap-ready beer, but those are unfortunately untrue.James and Charlie joined me on the tour both “to understand beer better since Dad likes it”, but also (primarily) because kids got a soda (famous Fanta!) instead of beer at the end. I got a tripel this time.After the tour was over, the other two joined us and we ate at the brewery restaurant. Henry was initially daunted by the dimensions of this burger, but it proved to be no match for him.Also in Bruges is this famous Madonna by Michaelangelo, which was seized by both Napoleon (returned after his Waterloo, Belgium defeat in 1815) and the Nazis (returned thanks to the work of the “Monuments Men” during World War II.)
Ghent
Our third day staying in Bruges was actually spent day-tripping to the nearby city of Ghent, which we found to be equally beautiful along with less touristy, although as mentioned above we saved our waffle-dedicated stomach space for Bruges after we got back.
See? Beautiful. Here’s the clock tour and main square.Ghent also had canals everywhere.And cool murals!This mural included a sculpture.And a big castle!The best part of the castle was that the audioguide was legitimately funny because they had a comedian do it. If you’re in Ghent, it’s highly recommended.James liked it, even though, he doesn’t usually like audioguides. Karen captured this candid and completely non-staged smile by me, possibly of the guide discussing yogurt sell by dates.Charlie, however, skipped the audioguide, although he did listen to this part about the toilets. Aiming for authenticity, he did so while sitting on the toilet. (He’s watching me now on a train and says it wasn’t actually authentic because he’s still wearing his pants.)We did a canal cruise too, although no one but me could hear the guide, so everyone else was bored.Ghent from the top of the castle.
Amsterdam
After 4 nights in Bruges, we took a couple of trains to Amsterdam, staying there for 5 nights. We had a great Airbnb a little bit west of the central city and really enjoyed our time there. Here are some pictures from our first day:
The highlight of the day was the lakeside beach about 25 minutes walk from our place. We like Airbnbs for lots of reasons, but in this case, the host was extra helpful about suggesting where we should go (including here!)Side view, courtesy of KarenAs we walked home around the lake, we found a place to feed birds. Definitely a recurring theme.Downtown Amsterdam around 8pm, in search of stroopwafels. As I think I’ve mentioned, James is on a mission to have a pancake or waffle in every country we visit.The verdict: OK? More like an OK cookie and not in the same league as Belgian waffles. James, Charlie, and I got McDonald’s later because we were still hungry. (County 32!)Even though the waffles disappointed, we definitely enjoyed the views.I started the day with a nice run across some canals and through Vondelpark. More on Vondelpark in a bit.
For our second day, we thought it was important to rent bikes since bike riding is iconically Dutch (I’m 1/8th Dutch!) and Amsterdam is maybe the best city in the world for biking. Our destination was “Waterland”, which took us back in time to farming canals and fishing villages just a few miles north of downtown Amsterdam:
After spending 25 minutes or so biking through the city to the central train station, we caught this free ferry across to the north side. James had a seat behind me, but everyone else biked the 26 or so miles round trip.
Here’s a better view of the bike James and I shared. His main problem was the wind made him cold, so he stole Karen’s sweater.A brief stop to take pictures of the swans (next). Note James’s overlong sweater.Swans! This is just a few miles outside of a major city.Our lunch stop had, of course, a playground opposite it.Fewer pictures of the ride home because there were brutal headwinds. The 13 miles took us over 2 hours to finish. We were exhausted and very glad to return the bikes to the rental shop and walk again, although overall it was a great day.
At the end of the very long bike ride, we had a bit of a respite from city street bike lanes meandering through Vondelpark, a wonderful example of a big city park which included a playground with attached beergarden. Here are a few more pictures from our time in the park over the next few days.
One of many bridges and water featuresThe same bridge, but fancyDon’t worry, it was only a few inches deepWe fed a lot of ducks hereJames happened to be wearing his “hexagons are the bestagons” shirt for this visit to the hexagonally tiled garden.Part of the booze-enabling playground. (Squint to see the slide tower through the trees.)
And of course we visited a few museums in Amsterdam as well, although we realized too late that the Anne Frank House has a one-month-plus waiting list:
The Rijksmuseum was very cool and definitely worth a visit, but the highlight for James and Charlie was this interactive exploration game they gave to kids, where they gave them missions to find answers based on the guide. Occasionally, Karen and I were annoyed with their need to rush on to the next place before we had a chance to see the art. (Henry went off on his own and read every single exhibit caption with lightning speed, which is his normal MO.)Here they are at Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, immediately after which they bolted off in search of the next site in their game and I spent 5 minutes trying to figure out where my family disappeared to in the crowded museum.If I have to know that this painting of a creepy, muscular Jesus exists, so do you. The Holy Family by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen, c. 1528 – c. 1530The following day, we went to the Van Gogh museum, which had this paper-based exploration guide for kids. Similarly engaging, though. (Tickets were sparse here too, but we were able to snag the last time 4 days after we looked.)Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette.Bedroom in Arles
Germany: Heusenstamm, Betzdorf, and Siegen
The final places we’ll visit in this post aren’t really tourist attractions, but rather places (and people) from Karen’s childhood when she spent much of her summers visiting family in Germany. We started by leaving Amsterdam around 6:30am in order to catch a few trains for the Frankfurt suburb of Heusenstamm where we met her Tante Marienne for lunch. Marienne is Jorg’s mother, so maybe you’ll again note the familial resemblance to James? (Jorg was also instrumental in helping us set up this meeting–thanks, Jorg!)
She and Tante Edith were leaving the next day from Heusenstamm for a Danube river cruise and we were hoping to catch Edith for lunch as well, but she wasn’t able to make it south from Betzdorf in time to see us. (Edith didn’t have a cell phone, so we couldn’t coordinate anything complicated.) Instead, we crossed paths and stayed at her home in Betzdorf for a couple of nights after picking up a key from her friend at the jewelry store. (In German, “dorf” means village, and the boys and I definitely found it to be a cute little village.)
Karen’s Oma’s old house. Her bedroom had that top window.There was a VERY big hill to get up to Tante Edith’s house.We stretched out once we got there and very much appreciated the hospitality! Karen and I had visited with Henry in 2010 and the house was exactly as I remembered it.View of Betzdorf from Tante Edith’s living room.Downtown Betzdorf. That cool structure is just a bike ramp to the second level of the shopping structure.We made a little trip to the nearby town of Siegen. Here we are after tiring ourselves out climbing to the top of the hill there.
The next day, we continued on to Switzerland, which will be another post. Here’s our country count up to this point:
8th, 9th, and 10th countries of our trip
Me: 57 countries (including 32 eating McDonald’s) (no new countries, but added Belgium and Netherlands to the McDonald’s list!)
Karen: 54 countries (no change)
Henry: 24 countries (he’d been to Germany in 2010, so only +2)
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
OK, I’m not going to continue with the whole thing, but I thought quoting Dicken’s opening sentence to the book that I used to title this post would be a fun way to start since I’ve learned so much about London and Paris over the years from reading. To highlight something more recent, here was a fun moment for James during our brief couple of days in London:
After some deliberation, we’ve decided he’s a Ravenclaw. We just finished reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (book 5).
For me, the highlight of London was Bletchley Park where I took this picture of Alan Turing’s desk:
He probably could have used more light.
Turing gained more attention recently through the 2014 film, The Imitation Game, which one reviewer called “one of the most important stories of the last century [and] one of the greatest movies of 2014.”
For me, besides the opportunity to learn more about arguably the most impactful work in all of WWII, I enjoyed learning more about Turing in particular (there were thousands of other people involved in codebreaking, but he was the most famous) because it recalled phrases from my Electrical & Computer Engineering days like “Turing Complete”, “Universal Turing Machine”, and “Turing Test”. The museum didn’t cover those concepts, but Turing certainly left a legacy far greater even than the codebreaking work to which he was central. (It’s long, but if you’re on the nerdier side, you might enjoy this novel by Neal Stephenson, half of which is a historical fiction centering Turing and the events around Bletchley Park. “Long” and “nerdier side” are qualifiers for most of his books, so I’ve of course read all of them.)
London
Besides those highlights, after arriving in town very late the night before via a delayed train from Scotland, we only had a couple of days in London. Knowing we were planning to spend the second one at Bletchley Park, we spent the first rushing through some of the big sights. First, here’s a before and after of James being punched by an ancienct Egyptian fist:
I checked and he wasn’t seriously injured, but “the punch” does foreshadow how everyone was left feeling after a day of rushing from place to place after a too-short night of sleeping. The pictures above are taken from the astonishingly packed-with-historic-relics British Museum, and on the day we visited, it was equally packed-with-British-schoolchildren and other tourists. (Including us!) To illustrate, here are Charlie and James in front of the Rosetta Stone:
Sure, it’s maybe the most famous thing there, so you might expect that part to be crowded, but look behind–every nook and cranny was equally full of people!
Here are the rest of us, exhausted by all the people right before we left after an hour:
Henry, briefly, was able to find a quiet section on the top floor, but was then quickly inundated by schoolchildren. They weren’t the data-stealing Dutch kind, though, so he was able to text us an update and arrange a rendezvous.
After evacuating from the crowd, we tried to raise our spirits with some excellent ice cream, but as you can see from this progression of pictures, the boys were getting tired:
Chinatown!Picadilly Circus!Buckingham Palace!Hyde Park (the original)!Natural History Museum!End of Natural History Museum! (About to fall over!)
At this point everyone was exhausted, so we took the tube back to the hostel. It was rush hour, though, so we experienced even more crowding, which explains why the boys had no interest in leaving after dinner to join me and Karen in another walk around to see the city:
River Thames and The Eye! This is also the point where Karen stopped acquiescing to my concerning selfie habit.Obligatory picture of Big Ben, after which we had another solid hour of walking to reach over 24,000 steps for the day.
Bletchley Park
I said that the Bletchley Park trip was a highlight for me, but the entire family enjoyed the second day in the London area more than they did the first. Here are a few more pictures of the experience:
The British spy service purchased this entire mansion and grounds for the work. Somebody needed better purchasing controls.The boys were given these really great “spy” assignment books to guide them through the museum. The staff seemed unconcerned when I informed them that the kids were German citizens, which seems like a real problem with operational security to me.Listening for codesOne of the work areas for officers“The best tomato soup outside of Beye School.” (He said it started to taste less good at the end.)
Paris
The next morning, we took the Eurostar across the chunnel to Paris. James was extremely excited because it was his birthday and he’d planned out the day:
Special train to Paris, where they’re celebrating Bastille Day for my birthday
Eat a baguette (one of his favorite foods)
Eat a crepe (one of his other favorite foods)
He has constructed a mission for himself to eat a pancake (or similar) in every country we visit, so he checked that off the list on the first day in Paris:
The rest of us had burgers. Also, Orange Fanta in Europe began our trip with near mythical status, but has since lost its shine a little.From the top of Montmarte! With Lemon and Sugar.He toyed with eating non-bread foods: here’s dinner, but the “steak” he and Charlie ordered from a kids menu, was actually a dry ground beef patty and generally disappointing.Speaking of disappointing, these are all over Paris and we also spotted “French tacos” in Belgium and the Netherlands. We’re not sure why they exist, but felt offended for our North American brethren.
We spent the next few days visiting some of our favorite sites without going too fast–this was my fifth time to Paris and similar for Karen. In fact, because we would prefer to see things that are also new to us, we weren’t planning to stay for 5 nights, but we found a nice (and affordable!) Airbnb so thought we could rest a bit. Here are a few highlights from our trip. (Not captured is Charlie’s macaron cooking class, which included normal sweet ones as well as blue cheese and foie gras, which he made me eat.)
The boys dubbed this Rodin classic, “The Why”, because it reminded them of this internet meme. (Actually “Jean de Fiennes” from “The Burghers of Calais”)Henry called me a weirdo for trying to take pictures of butts. (“The Mature Age” by Camille Claudel.)He had similar concerns about “The Kiss”.So of course one correct answer is, “a teenager who is frequently embarassed by his father.”Karen and I caught an excellent concert at Sainte-Chapelle, which somehow I had never visited in those four other trips. There was a string quartet, mostly accompanying a really great soprano.
The first image is by the River Seine right after the concert and the second from the next morning from the same spot facing the other way. We stayed 5 miles north of here, so it was a long but memorable run, although I could have done without having to climb up and down Montmarte at the end. (I went around to follow a canal on the way in.)
We visited the Conciergerie because Marie Antoinette was kept there prior to her beheading and we were trying to cover some interesting French Revolution facts with the boys. They had this cool augmented reality tablet, though, that mostly focused on medieval history which they really enjoyed.Charlie approved of Whistler’s Mother, but found the audioguide for kids “annoying” and generally did not enjoy the Musee D’Orsay because “it was full of art”.James appreciated this old train station clock, but was similarly unimpressed.James was instead obsessed with getting a great picture of the Eiffel Tower. (He thought I did a good job with this one from our river cruise.) He’s our most prolific photographer and I’m really glad we thought to give him Karen’s old iPhone for the trip.
Mont-Saint-Michel
For our final day in Paris, we split up, with Henry and Charlie opting to stay at the Airbnb (ostensibly to at least partially do homework) while Karen, James, and I took a very long tour to UNESCO World Heritage listed Mont-Saint-Michel, which was probably the number one site Karen wanted to see in France. Until the day before we went, we’d been planning to travel to Rennes and see it from there, but rearranged our travel plans in Paris, so the 14-hour bus tour from Paris was our only chance to make the trip.
I was skeptical that it would be worth it–it’s a tourist magnet and the day was over 100 degrees, but we had a great time and several weeks later James still rates it his favorite day of our trip. Here are a few pictures of the day.
Approaching the island from our tour bus. (I sat next to Sharon, an intrepid world traveller and recently retired banker from New York City who gave us advice for our Africa leg and, surprisingly to me at least, has seen Pearl Jam in concert all over the world almost 40 times. She was going to catch them two nights in a row in Amsterdam the next week.)Crossing the bridge to the island. Picture taken by Drew, a Virginian recent college grad who left his family in Portugal and decided to tag along with us for most of the day.Being by the sea, we of course saw these guys again. Charlie was safe at home in Paris, though.Karen made all her dresses for this trip because (a) she’s awesome and (b) she wanted pockets.See? He had a good day. (The two stops for ice cream probably helped.)View from the topThe interior is full of this cool gothic architecture. Which makes sense, because it’s over 1,000 years old. This big wheel was used to raise food up from the shore.
Two last views from looking up:
After adding France, here’s our family country count:
7th country of our trip
Me: 57 countries (including 30 eating McDonalds) (no change)
