34 Days in Europe

34 Days in Europe

 

Traveling anywhere is always an adventure but traveling in Europe has been one of the highlights of my life. Though the pandemic has slowed our trips abroad yet it gives me time to reflect on recent trips and comment on the highs and lows of each. And since there were very few lows this article will express my delights concerning our 34 day driving trip around Europe, with a few plane and train rides to break up the travelogue. Let’s get to it.

 

Any great trip requires planning which should be part of your overall experience. Ours began while we were living in China. We had decided that we could do a 30-40 day trip, and hit around seven countries. But where to begin our trip? 

 

We decided on Germany since I’d been there before and loved it. And the obvious arrival city to me was Munich, since we wanted mostly to visit southern Germany and then cross over to Austria and Switzerland.

 

Day one started off a little rough. We landed at the Munich airport just fine but once we got to the checkin gates things began to get a bit dicey. Although we were first in line at the gate the arrival guards made our entire plane load of passengers wait until other planeloads were checked in ahead of us. Frustrating but not disheartening. We eventually got through that obstacle only to meet another one. 

 

It seems that the car rental service would not accept any of our credit cards as I had forgotten to inform our banks that we were traveling from Asia to Europe. This was a huge error. We had to call the bank in order that they would open our cards for use in Europe., which took a bit of patience but eventually everything worked out. Lesson learned. The good that came out of all this frustration was that the car rental service upgraded our car to a really nice Peugeot SUV.

 

Since we didn’t want to drive very far, our first night was spent at a hotel just northwest of the airport.