Ik denk ten slotte dat het alle geboekt is! Soort van.
OK…I have established I hate planning trips. But for our two weeks in Europe, I realised that I had to throw “me” out the window, because a 10-year-old kid and my wife won’t travel at all like I do.
The irony is that I talk a good game about not planning, but I was always the “scout” in school who would be sent ahead, make the plans and then people would catch up. I was the canary of Europe, in a way. But I did always did have a pretty roughed out plan in my head, but I could just adjust as things changed. This was sooooooo before cell phones, cheap calling cards, and WiFi. We would just pick a spot, a place on a map, and decide we were all meeting there at X-time someplace 12 hours away and those that were in, were in.
This meant learning a great leson about Europe…just wing it.
But that was when I was 21. It was a very good year.
Then the times I have gone back have all been business trip, except for a trip to Penzance (which was awesome) on my own dime, attached to a business trip. I’m pretty fearless in Europe when it comes to “no worries.”
But how fair is that to a 10-year-old girl making her first intercontinental trip? Not very; I could see it and think it.
Then panic set in, that I have to have some skeleton barebones plan for this couple of weeks. She’s 10…she doesn’t need to see all of Europe.
Which brings me to my “AHA!” moment…this isn’t about me or Pilar at all…it’s giving Big A a taste of actually living in The Netherlands. We’re not going to schlep around and jump on trains and read schedules and be crazy for her first trip. And wait…I’ve done that when I played Tonto back in 1991…it does mean planning.
So with this epipheny I started e-mailing around to old haunts and old friends. DOH! Ummm…the reason our airfare was cheap was because Easter fall right smack dab in the middle of it. So I had to keep playing the cards, playing the contacts, and finding people that could not only tell me they were booked but hand me off to others that could help me.
Now, I won’t be shy about this…I was throwing Big A’s name around like a bribe. And I was futzing around with Dutch using a translator. The funniet thing is that some of my Dutch reading skils started coming back as I cruised around websites and e-mails. But it seemed like everything was booked. What had I gotten us into? Two weeks of being nomads? NOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
And then late Monday night, things started to change. Found an apartment in Amsterdam for a week. Found a hotel in Haarlem for a couple of nights. Found a large room in downtown Maasricht for the rest…BOOM! Down to one last night to book!
I have no clue where that one night will be…it’s a plan with just enough mystery, it’s almost like I planned it to not happen correctly. I needed just a little bit of leaving and figuring “it will work itself out.” Big A needs home bases for the bulk of the trip.
But once I realized that just because we were near Paris, Brugge, Brussels, Berlin, et al…it didn’t mean we had to go there. That will just be a blur to her. She needs to shop in the market and fiddle with what’s on TV and see a church service in Cologne. Play around with the places. Fall in love with the idea.
Yes, we’ll day trip and do that stuff. No problem. We might even rent a car for a day or two.
I am just happy with this little mix of an adventure. She is old enough to be acutely aware, young enough to be a little tepid, smart enough to absorb it, and silly enough to have fun with it. Add to that the fact she’s pretty damned flexible, within a structure.
I can’t be a single traveler just zipping around place to place this trip. It’s got a bigger meaning that I hope Big A will get in her gut the rest of her life.
Funny how plans work…