European Vacation – FP Edition

My brother-in-law and his wife promised each of their kids a vacation to anywhere in the world upon graduating high school.

My wife and I thought that was a cool idea and vaguely promised something similar to our children. The cheapskate in me secretly hoped that each of my graduating seniors would choose a tour of public libraries in Kansas City, MO.

Alas, my eldest just graduated high school and declared that our family was headed to Europe. And thus, my dreams of a free-ish vacation were crushed.

Since traveling across the pond is expensive and physically exhausting, we converged on a three-week itinerary to make the financial and physical cost worthwhile:

Our itinerary:

• Drive 6 hours to Minneapolis.
• Take direct flight from MSP to London. Stay 4 nights in London.
• Take Eurostar train from London to Paris. Stay 1 night in Paris.
• Rent car at Paris airport. Drive to Amsterdam (through Belgium). Stay 4 nights.
• Drive to Kaiserslautern, Germany. Stay 4 nights.
• Drive to Innsbruck, Austria (through Switzerland). Stay 4 nights.
• Drive to Chamonix, France. Stay 4 nights.
• Drive to 7 hours to Paris, catch direct flight from MSP to Minneapolis, drive home.
  • Unfortunately, we got caught in a nasty thunderstorm on our way home causing us to arrive at 3am. Not fun, but especially not fun after 27 hours of continuous travel.

 

Overall thoughts:

• It was a wonderful trip.
• The Alps were my favorite part, by a large margin.
• My family is now addicted to a type of hiking/scrambling called “via ferrata.” I think it may have permanently ruined hiking for me. I find it more enjoyable to do as a family than climbing since it enables us all to “simul-climb” simultaneously which makes it so much more efficient for the 7 of us to get up a cliff.

 

Useful pointers:

• I found AuroEurope to be very useful in procuring a rental vehicle.
  • We converged on renting a gigantic 9-passenger full-sized van for our family of 7. It cost $1,300 for our trip. If you have a smaller family than mine, you can lease brand-new sedans in Europe for about the same price as renting (info here). We were REALLY close to pursuing this option and cramming into a 7-passenger station wagon, but opted to rent the jumbo passenger van instead. Perks to leasing: brand new vehicle, fully insured, super easy pick up / drop off.
  • The rental car counter at CDG is the stuff of my nightmares. I think we waited in line for 2 hours.
• Use Google Flights to track prices. Set up alerts and purchase when prices drop.
• Cash is obviously rather obsolete when traveling abroad. We used an ATM once or twice for cheapo souvenirs, but everything else was funneled through ~5% cash back no-foreign transaction credit cards. Almost every merchant had tap-to-pay options. We pocketed roughly $1k cash back on the trip.
• West End Theater tickets:
  • We got 30 GBP front-row tickets to Wicked:
    • Every Wednesday at 10am, Wicked’s 24 Front Row seats are available online for all performances in the following week (Tuesday-Sunday). Tickets are £29.50 with no additional fees (link).
    • I was still pretty jet lagged, so I slept through the first half of Wicked. Occasionally I’d be startled awake when the speaker blew out my eardrum (I was sitting a few feet in front of it).
  • My wife also used this site for discounted tickets to Hercules.
• Of the hotels we stayed, two stood out:
  • London Piccadilly Circus Hotel
    • We booked the “Cocoon 8” room for the 7 of us at $260/night. It was basically a glorified shoebox, but it was cheap, clean, quiet, and windowless. It was perfect for helping us sort through the haze of jetlag — we slept in until noon one day.
    • Really well located.
  • Innsbruck Sattlerhof
    • Beautiful lodging overlooking Innsbruck. Christine, our host, was incredibly kind and helpful to us.
• The Finance Buff’s recent post on international sim cards was very helpful. We bought 4 x eSim cards with 30gb of data for $15 each. In hindsight, we only needed two eSims.

 

Via Ferrata pointers:

Given that this was the highlight of our trip, by far, here’s a few more thoughts:

• Equipment required:
  • ~$200 to purchase 1.) Harness, 2.) Via Ferrata Lanyards, and 3.) Helmet.
  • Optionally, a pair of $2 gardening gloves is probably a good investment.
    • We bought a 6-pack of gardening gloves at Costco for $11.49. It was a good investment, though I went without since there were 7 of us.
• Via Ferratas are free, accessible to anyone—just show up and hike/scramble. So much fun.
• Each hike/climb/scramble is divided into sections which are rated for difficulty (much like climbing). If you can climb a ladder, you can probably easily climb anything graded A, B, or C. Routes rated D or above are a bit more strenuous, like climbing a ladder that is leaning backwards. The hardest via ferrata routes I climbed were substantially easier than any outdoor climbing I’ve done in my life. I would feel comfortable recommending it to anyone with moderate fitness who wants an adventure and can stomach the exposure (like 500 feet of air beneath your feet).
• As far as safety goes, there are a couple of obvious best practices:
  • Never unclip both lanyards at the same time. When you get to a transition point, unclip one at a time.
  • Stay out of the fall zone of the climber above you.
  • Be extremely careful to not kick down rocks to climbers below you. Out of the many routes we completed across many days, this was only an issue for only one pitch of one climb.
    • If you do kick something down, yell “rock”. If you are the climber below, don’t look up when “rock” is yelled.
  • Try not to climb in thunderstorms. Metal cables conduct electricity.
• Climber’s Paradise was a useful website for Innsbruck via ferratas.

 

Finances:

To state the obvious, a three-week trip to Europe for a family of seven is not cheap. We spent ~$20k:

• Flights: $6.4k
• Hotels: $5.1k
• All Other Transportation: $3.5k
• Entertainment: $1.6k
• Food: $1.5k
  • Yes, I flew to Europe with 10 lbs of oatmeal, granola, and almonds. Plus bowls and spoons.
• Climbing gear: $1.1k
• Dog sitting: $900
• Bathrooms: $3.59 (only three paid restroom visits)

 

Takeaways:

• I kind of fell in love with Kaiserslautern, Germany. I could move there tomorrow.
• I prefer mountains to cities. No big surprise there.
• We had several 10-15 mile walking days. I love the walking/biking culture in Europe. American car culture is destructive—to the soul, the body, the environment, and the mind.

 

London

One of the few pics I got of a red bus. We rode them all over London.

One of the more expensive naps I’ve taken in a while.

3.50 GBP lunch special from Tesco Express (with clubcard discount QR code that proved to be difficult to procure).

Magical evening walk back to the hotel after Hercules.

 
Obligatory picture of people wearing funny looking hats.

Eating authentic London cuisine. The $7 kids meal proved to be one of the best deals we found in London.

We were there during the world premier of Jurassic Park #34 (I’ve lost count). Somehow, FC2 procured one of the 30-foot tapestries after they ripped down the set of the premier and took it to our shoe-box hotel room.

 

 

Paris

Olympic balloon thing.

Notre Dame Cathedral.

Our full-sized rental van. Almost brand new when we got it. We put 2,200 miles on it. It was the first time I’d driven stick shift since my teenage years in the 90’s.

BBQ Chicken Pizza from the Paris Food Court was heavenly. If they offered it in the US, I would probably eat it daily. Why is the US Costco Food court the worst in the world!?!?!?

 

Belgium

Ghent was stunning.

They like bikes in Europe. Especially when driving in Amsterdam, it took concerted effort to not run over cyclists.

The kids are addicted to Formula 1. They do F1 fantasy, watch every qualifying & race. We made an obligatory stop in at the Spa track. It is amazing how hilly the circuit was — something you don’t appreciate on TV. I would have loved to bike/jog it (we saw a person jogging it).

Three-country point (where Netherlands, Belgium and Germany converge).

 

Amsterdam

This wooden clog shop in Zaanse Schans was pretty cool.

Hanging out in the North Sea.

Dutch F1 Grand Prix track, Zandvoort. There were a bunch of people racing Corvettes and Porches on track when we were there. Pretty fun to see.

Canal Tour.

 

Germany

My brother-in-law works on the US military base in Kaiserslautern. His family has lived many places: Virginia, Alaska, Colorado, and New Mexico but they like Kaiserslautern the best. I can see why.

Picking buckets of cherries in their back yard. We ate our weight in cherries over the few days we stayed with them. It was glorious.

 
We took a Rhine River tour, which was pretty fun. Ferry => chair lift up mountain => 2 mile walk => chair lift down mountain.

Chimney log cakes were incredible.

Happy hippo candy was dangerously addictive.

Neuschwanstein Castle in the Bavarian Alps. FC4 really wanted to do this, so we did.

 

Innsbruck, Austria

Our lodging overlooked Innsbruck. It was beautiful.

We had thunderstorms like clockwork every evening. It was pretty mesmerizing.

Here is the map of one of the Via Ferratas we climbed, with a few different variations available. We opted for the more family friendly variant when available.

FC5 was too short to reach the top cable of the bridge, so he crossed holding his lanyards only. We rigged up an extra tether for a bit of added safety.

Crossing a raging 500ft tall waterfall (video below…be advised that the sound is deafening).

A well-deserved hammock rest on top of one of our climbs. Little did we know that it was about to downpour on us (next picture).

A wet ~1 hr hike back to the car.

Switzerland

Driving from Interlaken to Chamonix, we saw a few options on Google Maps. I chose the one that took us through the heart of the alps, thinking we’d simply drive through a tunnel. Instead, a train transported our car through a tunnel. It was pretty magical.

View from our our car-train.

Lindt chocolate factory.

Chamonix

This was the view from our hotel room. It was fun opening our window each morning and seeing people landing in our back yard.

Sunset view from our hotel.

Took two gondolas to get a good look at Mont Blanc and the surrounding glaciers/peaks.

Glacial ice cave.