A first family vacation in Europe
It is not unusual for folks to look forward to their next trip as soon as one ends. For us, we started thinking about a summer family vacation to Europe, shortly after returning from a four week winter holiday to attend a family wedding in China.
Our trip idea, a first visit to Europe, was seeded mostly on the desire to pay Jessica a visit in the UK as she was completing her law studies at the end of the spring semester. We committed ourselves to the trip after purchasing our airline tickets in mid-April after a fairly intense work period at the office. We knew it would be fairly easy to get our holidays approved following the recent federal general elections.
We further welcomed a long break offered by this Europe trip after we undertook the previous Fall our basement finishing project. Since then, we had been working most evenings and weekends on the basement renovations.
Except for drafting an initial trip itinerary, the planning of our vacation really did not take place until the last few weeks before our departure since I kept on wanting to complete as much as possible of the basement renovations. We opted to leverage as much as possible the European rail system and as result we bought a 3 day flex-pass from Brit Rail and a 10 day Global flex Eurail pass – some hefty upfront expenses!