Where in the world is Camy?

And when are they coming home? 🤔

You wouldn’t have any idea from reading this blog, which is now lagging four solid months behind our travels! No, we’re not still in Scotland…that was in July! 🤨

In fact, we’re presently on a 10,000 ft glacier in Austria near Zell am See. Amy and Griffin (who just re-learned how to ski) are on the slopes while I’m staying toasty warm in our apartment and trying (and utterly failing) to catch up on this travelogue. Yes, perhaps I could be a little more succinct. But that’s just not my style!

Anyway, while I continue to beaver away on detailed accounts on each of our stops, here’s a quick recap of our travels to catch you up.

Where we’ve been

Ireland: From Scotland, we bounced over to the Emerald Isle with my mom for a couple weeks in mid-August. We met my sister Shannon (a proper Irish name, wouldn’t you say?) and celebrated Griffin’s 7th bday there. Dublin has become such a modern, international tech hub that it wasn’t as charming as we had hoped; less culture shock = less interesting to us. But lively little Galway on the opposite coast made up for it, as did a day on the lonely, windswept Aran Islands. And the tours at the Jameson distillery and Guinness brewery were pretty cool.

Montenegro & Croatia: From there, we took one of our few intra-European flights down to the Balkans. We were still locked out of the Eurozone for another six weeks, so we decided to spend it in these two countries I have long yearned to visit. Montenegro is one of Europe’s youngest nations and still an undiscovered (and affordable) gem, with a gorgeous coastline on the Adriatic, some of Europe’s most rugged mountains, and everything from primitive villages to luxury yachts. We loved every bit of it, especially staying on a family farm, ziplining across Europe’s deepest canyon, and taking a chairlift up to some of the country’s tallest peaks. Then we popped over the border to much better known Croatia, where we met up with friends from Santa Barbara for some all-night partying and shenanigans in the legendary city of Dubrovnik and on the beaches of the island of Hvar. Followed by some recovery time in Split with another dear friend.

France: After initially objecting to it, Amy surprised me by planning a couple weeks in northern France…and surprised herself by loving it! But who really can resist Paris? We met up with Amy’s parents there for some serious sightseeing and museum hopping. We also explored two much less touristy towns: Lille, a city that is both old and new and as much Flemish as it is French; and Reims, home to a famous cathedral and all the most famous champagne houses, where we were joined by a Santa Barbaran friend and Francophile. But we quickly had to swap out our swim trunks and flip-flops for sweaters and scarves…we weren’t on the sunny Adriatic anymore!

Belgium and the Netherlands: By mid-October, we made our way north to the low countries. We were utterly charmed by medieval Bruges and Ghent. Bustling Brussels was less endearing, but we did get to visit a sewer museum! In Utrecht, we discovered a lively and delightful bike-centric college town where we wished we had gone to school. The fall colors were stunning! Then we said goodbye to Amy’s parents and met up with old friends in Rotterdam, including one of Griffin’s favorite girlfriends. We stumbled into the church from which the Pilgrims left for Plymouth, then headed off to crazy, lovely Amsterdam for a whirlwind weekend. Followed by three days at one of the Netherland’s best kept secrets: Efteling, a thoroughly enchanting theme park in a forest. Griffin is already planning his next visit!

Germany: We followed our friends back to their home in Berlin, where they relocated from LA a few years back. It was nice to have a comfortable homebase, some company for Griffin, and personal tour guides as we explored this sprawling and fascinating metropolis. I became particularly interested the city’s dark Nazi past, exploring a vast museum in a WWII bunker, while we also enjoyed some lighter moments clubbing until 3 in the morning. From there, we headed off on our own, exploring some of the loveliest towns you’ve ever seen, including Erfurt, Bamberg, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber, while also learning about the struggles of life in former East Germany. As it began to snow, we wrapped things up in Munich, where we reveled in the most amazing Christmas markets, explored fairy tale Neuschwanstein Castle, and spent Thanksgiving stuffing ourselves with beer, pretzels, and kaiserschmarrn pancakes.

And now we’re here, in Austria (again). It’s been exactly eight months since we set out on this journey, and after visiting 13 countries, we’re still not done!

Where we’re going next

We’re finishing up the last two weeks of our European sojourn with stops in Salzburg, Austria; Bratislava, Slovakia; and Budapest, Hungary. After that, our visas (and our tolerance for the cold) will be exhausted, but we’re not quite ready to come home yet. Oh no! Amy has planned an exciting six weeks in sunny, summery South Africa, including Christmas in Cape Town, a drive along the coastal Garden Route, and visits to a few public and private game parks. Quite a shocking transition from wintery Europe!

And that’s it.

When we’re coming home

Our flights home are booked, and we’ll be back in Santa Barbara the first week of February. We can’t wait to catch up with you all! ❤️

And for you to see just how much our little boy has grown up (including losing 3 teeth). The shy six-year-old that left in March has become an accomplished seven-year-old world traveler—and now a skiier and ice skater too! He can walk 6 to 7 miles per day without (much) complaining. After taking all these challenges fearlessly in stride, we’re eager to see what else he will do. We’ve loved spending so much time with him, and it’ll be quite a shock when he goes back to school and we stop spending every moment together.

We’ve grown too. For many couples (including some we know), a trip like would be a make-or-break event. Too often, spending this much time together has a tendency to exacerbate otherwise overlookable differences until they become insufferable. We’ve certainly had our moments (mostly between the time Amy wakes up and when we have to get out of our AirBnB!). But overall, we’ve gotten along really well, even when things have been stressful, and have fallen into a nice rhythm. And if we can do this together, I’m pretty sure we can do anything.

What else we’ve learned

We can’t wait to come back to our home and to stop living out of suitcases. Over the past eight months, we’ve stayed in at least 53 AirBnBs, plus a handful of traditional B&Bs and hotels. We’ve tried to take things a bit slow, but packing up our things and moving every three to seven days is a bit exhausting.

It’s hard to pack light. Though we’ve definitely fine-tuned our packing and have sent plenty of stuff home with friends and family, we’re still carrying a ton. Each of us is toting around a diverse wardrobe from summer swimwear to our new snow gear. And we need about a week’s worth of clothing for each place, ’cause not every AirBnB has laundry facilities. Meanwhile, I’ve got a blanket, inflatable mattress, and inflater so that Griffin has a place to sleep even in one bedroom apartments, plus a small heater we picked up for the draftier places. Griffin is carrying his own clothes, books, schoolwork, toys, and trinkets. Amy has her big Nikon and an extra lens, a bunch of arts & crafts supplies (?!?), and a year’s ration of contact lenses. We have two laptops, a tablet, and a whole mess of plug adapters & charging cables. We schelp around a bag of cooking essentials like oil, salt, tea and coffee, plus a smaller one of multivitamins, aspirin, and cold medicine, which seem harder to get here. (You have to talk to a pharmacist in Germany to even get ibuprofen.) We must look pretty ridiculous lugging all this stuff around, but we know our limits: we can walk about 1 kilometer fully laden before we collapse!

Public transit is even easier than we thought. We’ve really mastered the trains here, and it wasn’t hard. Trains are plentiful and almost always prompt; tickets can be easily purchased online and can generally be used on any train that day; and even moving between countries is effortless. Especially in Germany and France, the national rail companies have apps that are as sophisticated and elegant as Uber or Lyft. And every major city we’ve visited has consolidated their transit so that a single pass works for buses, trams, trains, and the underground. Who needs a car?

Taxis and ridesharing is a bit more complicated. Speaking of Uber and Lyft…they don’t work nearly so well here as at home. Europe has its own competing services, like Bolt and FreeNow, but even those don’t work consistently in all the places we’ve visited. Sometimes, there’s a long line of taxis lined up in front of the train station; sometimes, as in Sorrento, there’s none to be found anywhere; and sometimes, like in Edinburgh or Dublin, there’s a two-hour wait.

Biking in Europe is fantastic, as Amy can attest. If only the U.S. prioritized bicycle infrastructure and safety like they do here. Maybe someday we’ll do some bike touring in Europe.

Eating is delightful…and challenging: For a lot of people, one of the highlights of traveling is dining out, and they spend quite a lot of time doing it. Not us. We usually splurge on one meal out each day, plus a coffee + pastry stop, and eat at our apartment the rest of the time. But we’ve still been eating very well, and overall the food has been incredible and diverse. The pastries are plentiful and always fresh, even at the train stations. Amy is in heaven with the vast array of organic, full-fat dairy products, and she subsists on local cheese, chocolate, berries, smoked salmon, and cappaccinos. We loved the wine and tapas in Spain, the natas (custard tarts) in Portugal, the pizzas in Italy, the buttery scones in Scotland, the savory pies in Ireland, the apple strudel in Austria, the dates and figs in Croatia, the waffles and beer in Belgium, and the pretzels in Germany (as well as some top-notch sushi!). Finding vegan food for me in most countries has generally been pretty easy, even delightful at times. Who knew that Lubljana, Slovenia, was a vegan hot spot? But navigating a different grocery store every few days, and figuring out what everything is, is pretty time-consuming.

Getting cell service is cheap and easy. We had hoped and planned to use Google Fi for our entire trip, but they cut off our data after three months abroad. Fortunately, they still let us get calls and texts, and fortunately, our phones allow dual SIMs, so we can get separate data SIM cards here. Much like the U.S., every country here seems to have their own unique triumvirate of cell phone companies, but the Eurozone has has made roaming fees within Europe illegal. So over the past two months and five countries, we’ve used some French data SIMs that cost $20/month for 25 GBs (or 200 GBs within France). Nothing that cheap at home!

Most everything else is easy too. Nowadays, almost all of continental Europe uses a single currency and a single electrical plug. Sure, there’s dozens of languages, but if you speak English, you can get by almost anywhere. Especially in France and Germany, many people will bashfully say they don’t speak English, but they do far more than they let on. Lucky for us! (And Google Translate is great for translating menus.)

And we’ve never felt unsafe. Even in obscure and slightly backwards places like Montenegro, we have never once been worried about anything happening to us or Griffin. People are always willing to help, especially when they see our cute kid. We haven’t been robbed or pickpocketed. On the contrary, we feel safer here than at home, especially with all the gun violence and political rage there. There are dozens of ways you’re more likely to get injured or die in the U.S. than here. Sadly, we have a palpable feeling that we are going home to a scarier, less civilized place.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is next door, not a distant land. No, I don’t think anybody is seriously worried that any other European country will be invaded or bombed anytime soon. But we’ve met multiple Ukrainians here who have escaped, including a family in Munich that had been there for eight months, graciously taken in by a German family. After learning about the pretexts that Hitler used to invade Czechoslovakia, and Poland, it’s hard to believe that Putin is using the exact same playbook. No wonder Europeans are nervous.

The world feels like a smaller place

We’ve seen and done so much here. The sheer breadth of things to explore and learn is staggering, and personally, I love the all insights I’ve gained into history and western civilization. It’s been fascinating to learn what connects Charlemagne to the Third Reich, where my ancestors in the British Isles originally came from, how languages have evolved and diverged, and all the amazing things that have been created and destroyed in the name of God and kings. Amy has done a deep dive into the past 500 years of European art from the Dutch Masters to Klimt, Chagall, Van Gogh, and Picasso.

Countries and places that used to be foreign to us aren’t anymore. People who once seemed like strangers are now more familiar, all around us on trains, in restaurants and shops and museums, swigging mulled wine at Christmas markets or bombing down the slopes next to us.

The takeway for us is a total cliché—no matter where you go, people really aren’t so different. From the adorable man who rented us his apartment in Dublin, to the sassy graphic designer in Kotor, Montenegro, who told us about living through the collapse of Yugoslavia and hyperinflation, to Amy’s former exchange student from Belgium who showed us around Brussels while sharing his passion for making the world more sustainable. In fact, our one regret about this trip is that we haven’t hung with more locals. We’ve realized this sort of trip doesn’t lend itself to making relationships; not many people want to invest time getting to know an American family who will be moving on in a few days. That’s something we’ll try to remedy in the future.

Not that we’re going to be undertaking any more international expeditions for a while. We just took twenty years’ worth of vacations in a single year. That was intentional; we wanted to do this while we were young and healthy, while Griffin was still obsessed with his parents, and while our parents could join us. Consolidating our travels was also an attempt to make them a little less impactful and more sustainable. As a result, we plan to stay closer to home for at least the next few years. Goodness knows there’s plenty of adventures to be had near us. And hopefully this time with friends!

Much love to you all.