Jenss Family Travels: Out of Africa
Rainer Jenss and his family are currently on an around-the-world
journey, and they're blogging about their experiences for us at
Intelligent Travel. Keep up with the Jensses by bookmarking their posts, and follow the boys' Global Bros blog at National Geographic Kids.
Nine months and six days after pulling out of our driveway to start this year-long journey, I found myself back in familiar territory. Since I'm originally from Germany and have traveled extensively throughout the Continent, I feel very much at home in Europe. Even though I had spent just one day in Paris prior to our arrival, there was little concern with logistics or getting oriented to what would be the seventeenth country of the trip. In fact, after spending the last three months in Africa, it felt rather comforting to be here.
With just a few exceptions, we had most of the previous sixteen countries pretty well planned out before we got there. Generally speaking, Asia is not a good place to just wing it with two kids in tow. In New Zealand, we had a camper van to call home, and since Australia is so darn big, we'd have been crazy not to map out a route in advance and make sure we hit the spots we were most interested in. Even traveling across the U.S. required advance reservations if we had any intention of staying within the national parks in the height of summer.
The only problem was that we had just a little more than six weeks to explore Europe before we were due in South America for the final leg of our voyage. The upside was that we didn't have to subject ourselves to the high cost of being here for very long. Everything seems more expensive in Europe (the weak dollar doesn't help, even though it's strengthened about 20% against the euro since we left last July). Car rentals and gasoline prices makes traveling by train a serious option, although that's not cheap either. We even had to dish out more than 60 euros in tolls just to get from Paris to the German border. Ouch.
Without trying to sound too much like the Griswalds from European Vacation, we embarked on an ambitious plan to cover France, Germany and Italy in two weeks. We picked France because it was pretty much the only choice we had flying from the Seychelles. Besides, we're talking Paris, so there were no complaints here. Better still, my sister and her family were just a short Eurostar train ride away from their West London home, so they planned to meet us for the long Easter weekend. This meant we had to figure out what to do with four kids, not just two.
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