Post European Vacation: Random Thoughts

Annette and I went on a month-long trip through Europe to celebrate our 31st anniversary, from late May to late June. “Where’d you go?” you ask? Well:

We started in Denmark, visiting friends in Roskilde and touring around Copenhagen (including the Christiania neighborhood) and going to the Hans Christian Andersen museum. Then to Berlin, which was the first stop on our honeymoon way back when. Berlin included fancy food, wandering about, some modern art, the Stasi Museum, some theater (a show about David Bowie in Berlin), and generally soaking in the history of life in what was behind the iron curtain, like going to a museum about what life was like in East Germany. Then we went to three other places from the honeymoon: Meissen, Dresden (which is the big city of the region), and then Prague for a few days.

Then it was time for the second leg of the trip, a Viking river cruise from Prague to Paris— though really, from Nuremberg to Trier because most of the first and last days were on a bus. Cool/pretty stops included Bamberg, Würzburg, Heidelberg, Mainz, along the Rhein and by a whole bunch of castles, Cochem, Bernkastel, and Trier. Then onto the bus from Trier to Paris, with a lovely stop at the Luxembourg American Cemetery (which means I was in one more country than I was expecting on this trip), Reims (capital of the champagne region of France which features a cathedral that looks a lot like the Notre Dame in Paris), and then, Paris.

In Paris, we stayed at a hotel as part of the cruise for two nights and then for five nights at an apartment that we had stayed in the last time we were there, a dozen years ago. We went to a great No Kings Day protest organized by an expat group in Paris, the restored Notre Dame (amazing), Sacre-Coeur, and the Orsay, and we also took a bus trip out to Monet’s House in Giverny. We were going to the Catacombs, but it was closed because of a museum worker’s strike (more on that in a moment), so we went to the Picasso Museum. And we wandered around and gawked at a lot of stuff all along the way.

We also did a fair amount of what I’d describe as just “hanging out” while in Paris, both in the apartment and out eating or having a coffee or a cocktail. I had a list of food and cafe places to visit, but in the end, we didn’t go to any of them. Other than one recommendation from people who owned the apartment (Wepler), we just ate at places that looked good and that had seating, pretty much all bistros. Plus we ate dinner in the apartment three of the five nights we were at the apartment, a nice break from eating restaurant food for most of the previous three weeks.

That’s the recap; here are some random thoughts:

• I posted a lot of pictures along the way on Instagram (and thus also Facebook), and I have mixed feelings about this. It feels overly performative in a way, a kind of “hey, look at me!” attention-getting move. On the other hand, I always enjoy seeing other people’s travel pictures, and people have said nice things to me about my pictures. We went to a big family thing the weekend after we got back, my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary in Door County, and I caught up with a bunch of relatives I only (sorta/kinda) keep in touch with on Facebook. They all came up to me at some point at this party and told me it looked like a great trip.
• This was the longest trip I’ve ever been on (I think), and Annette and I travel quite a bit. We went on an epic transatlantic cruise with stops in London and Reykjavik in 2017 that was 21 days, and I think our honeymoon was also about three weeks. A month felt like a long time, and I was ready to go home when we did (Annette said she could have stayed longer).
• All of Europe is a trip hazard, with cobblestones everywhere and nothing level. And my God, the stairs, THE STAIRS! I’m kidding (sort of), and I suppose it’s kind of hard to make these 500 year old buildings more accessible. I am also pretty sure the code in Europe is a lot less strict than the ADA is here. Then again, a whole lot of Americans might be better off health-wise if they had to climb some stairs once in a while.
• Jim Gaffigan does have a point: we visited a lot of churches on this trip, and that’s not something we do back home.
• I would give our packing efforts a “B” because we overpacked, but we kind of had to overpack. The forecast for the first 10 or so days of the trip had highs in the 60s, and then highs in the 90s by the time we got to Paris. Also, we knew that for the second and third week of the trip we wouldn’t have access to a washing machine. Still, there was stuff I packed that I never wore, and that’s a mistake.
• We also had three different kinds of trips, each of which has different optimal packing strategies. The first part of the trip was kind of a “Rick Steves” style of travel: three or four different stops in about 15 days, almost always traveling by train. That’s the part of the trip where we were really overpacked, especially when we had to be quick to switch trains or when we had to haul our stuff up the stairs. The second part of the trip, a cruise, calls for a whole different packing strategy: bring as much stuff as you want because you barely have to handle your luggage yourself at all. The same is true with guided tours, though you do have to pack everything up every couple of days to move on to the next place. The third part of the trip, staying at a rented apartment (or a vacation home/cottage), is still a different packing strategy. It’s similar to a cruise in that you unpack and then only repack when you leave, but it also depends on the place. Most of the places we rent nowadays have a washing machine, making it easy to travel light. But if you’re going to stay in the same place for a week, well, why? When we rent a place “up north” or wherever in the US and we’re driving, I usually pack a box of kitchen supplies– some basic condiments/seasonings, a decent knife, etc. I could have used some of those things on this trip.
• I never felt that the Europeans or Canadians we met were angry at us for being Americans, though we do not give off “MAGA” vibes. The few Trumpy-types on the river cruise kept to themselves, and we saw some things that suggested the rise of the far right, especially in what had been East Germany. But every person we actually talked to basically said it must suck to be an American now, they all hated Trump, and they were worried about the US. I felt a sympathetic and welcoming vibe I wasn’t expecting.
• I’ve been on a few ocean cruises and I would (probably) go on another one of those, but I don’t think the river cruise was my cup of tea. It just wasn’t quite what I was expecting, I guess. You know the Viking commercials you see where the riverboat pulls up to a dock right in the heart of some charming city, allowing the passengers to explore at their own pace? This was not like that at all. Almost every stop required us to take a tour to see anything, on their schedule and always involving a bus ride. In contrast, ocean cruises make it easy for passengers to visit ports of call on their own. Plus the median age for passengers had to be mid-70s. I could go on, but you get the idea.
• Speaking of age: the main advantage of traveling when you’re young– like when we were on our honeymoon– is, well, youth. You are stronger, faster, can get by on a lot less sleep, stuff like that. I don’t know if this is automatically a trait of youth, but when I was in my late 20s, I was a lot more willing to stay in some less-than-comfy places. On our honeymoon, we stayed in a lot of “room for rent” kind of arrangements, some of them quite memorable for the wrong reasons. The advantage of traveling when you’re old (but not so old you can’t carry a bag, hustle up stairs, etc.) is money. I don’t think I would describe our trip as “luxurious” or “fancy,” but we also didn’t have to share a bathroom with any of the other people in the house.
• There were A LOT of tourists in the touristy spots, especially in Prague and Paris. When we went to the castle and cathedral in Prague, we were surrounded by middle school/high school student tour groups– probably on the same kind of bus trip that our kid took (when he was that age many years ago) to D.C. and Gettysburg, a pretty common right of passage around here. And groups of Asian tourists, other Americans, and a lot of European tour groups too. We were in Paris when staff at the Louvre went on strike, and the same union was on strike at the catacombs and for the same reason: too many tourists. Rick Steves had an interesting article/blog post about this, one where he also basically says, “hey, it’s not my kind of trips that are the problem,” but of course, it kind of is.
• At the same time, we found a lot of not so touristy places that were great: Roskilde with its cathedral and Viking Museum, basically all of Berlin, the Lobkowicz Palace and the Decorative Arts museum in Prague, and the Picasso museum in Paris, where were able to just sit and study a wall of portraits completely uninterrupted for about 10 minutes. So it is possible to avoid the crowds; you just have to visit some of the places not on everyone’s bucket list.
• And then there’s the expat question, something we have been talking about lately. Part of that has been motivated by current events, of course. More realistically, it might be something we try out in retirement, which is somewhere between 5 and 10 years away, depending on both money and our shifting moods about work and (gestures at the world broadly). Living abroad for a few years at the beginning of retirement might be a good idea. Still, I think this trip has convinced me I am not ready for that, at least not quite yet. As Twain might put it, I hate my government currently, but I still love my country. I would miss all of my ‘merican things and stuff, not to mention friends and family. Everyone pretty much everywhere speaks English well enough for someone like me to live anywhere and to get by. But I think it’d be lonely living in a country where the conversations all around me (people, but also signage, newspapers, TV shows, billboards, etc.) were happening in a language I did not understand. It’d probably be easier for me to move someplace where people spoke English.
• That said, if I were to move to one of the places we visited on this trip– or more realistically, if I were to go someplace we visited on this trip to stay for a few weeks or months– it’d probably be Berlin. There’s lots to see and do there– it’s about the size of metro DC– but it also seemed less of a destination than Paris or Prague, also kind of true of DC. And of course, also like DC, Berlin is the capital. It wasn’t cheap, but it also seemed reasonably affordable. We’re already talking about our next big trip, so who knows?