Terri and I have been to Europe on vacation previously 4 times. Three of those visits were to Italy and one was to Scotland and Ireland. We had also been there for business on multiple occasions, particularly Terri who traveled to Germany in her previous job at least twice a year. My first trip to Europe was way back in 1967 to visit relatives in Ireland. We spent 6 weeks there and although I was only 7 years old at the time, I still have many fond memories of it.

The trips we took to Italy were self-planned where we decided to visit particular cities. We made arrangements for moving from place to place on our own. We have friends in Monza, Silvio and Louisa, who we always stop to see as well. The Scotland-Ireland trip in 2003 was a bus tour organized by a Brendan Travel and one where the whole itinerary was planned in advance for us. This was an interesting way to travel and it reduced the stress of wondering where we were going next and how to get there, but it was a rather full schedule that required getting up early each day to pack up and move to a new location. Terri and I had taken to exploring the pubs in Scotland and Ireland during the evenings and had some late nights followed by early wake up calls so some of the bus travel remains a blur. But it’s a great way to see a lot in a short time and still affords some freedom to do things on your own. If you get a good tour guide, it can be very entertaining as well.

After watching several seasons of The Amazing Race, we got the bug to do some international travel again and so we began planning for a trip to Europe. I had accumulated enough frequent flyer miles on United to qualify for two round trip tickets to Europe, but after playing around on the United website for a while, it appeared that there were absolutely no frequent flyer seats available to any European city any time in 2006, so I called to talk to a real person at United. After searching around for about 30 minutes, we found that we could get into Ireland, but not out of it. However, we could get out of Amsterdam and back to the U.S. via Canada. Since we had planned to visit Ireland and Italy already, the challenge then was how to get from Ireland to Italy and then from Italy to Amsterdam. I had never been to Amsterdam before and so it seemed like a good place to visit as well.

I got on the Internet and started looking at Ryan Air and Aerlingus and was pleasantly surprised to find that one-way fares are very reasonable in Europe, something that you won’t find in the U.S., where they often cost more than a round trip fare. If you’re willing to fly out of cities that may be off the beaten path, Ryan Air has € .01 one-way fares! The € .01 fare is a little misleading because there are airport fees and taxes, but even so, the tickets come out to be around € 30 per ticket which is incredibly inexpensive. Our tickets from Dublin to Milan on Aerlingus were around €45 each. Ryan Air had similar prices.

We couldn’t get flights from Milan to Amsterdam at a reasonable price, but if we flew to Charleroi Airport outside of Brussels from Bergamo (about an hour east of Milan), we could get a Ryan Air € .01 fare! Then we just needed to figure out how to get from Brussels to Amsterdam, which would be a relatively easy train ride. This would give us a chance to see two new European countries and add some adventure to the trip.

Then next challenge was to find accommodations and plan the itinerary… more on that next time.

It had been more than 3 years since Terri and I had taken a vacation lasting longer than about 4 days. I find that if you can’t get away for at least 2 weeks, it doesn’t have the effect of a vacation, one that provides new perspectives and relieves stress. We took a 2-week tour of Scotland and Ireland in 2003 and it was wonderful, but Terri’s mom was traveling with us and was suffering from cancer. She was determined to make her first visit to Ireland and Scotland. The trip was difficult for her and although she tried to remain strong, her body wasn’t cooperating. She ended up in the hospital in Ireland for 3 days and passed away just a few months after returning to the U.S. So that trip was bittersweet for us because Terri’s mom got to see a lot of Scotland and some of Ireland for the first time, but it was also stressful because we knew she was not feeling well. After the tour concluded in Dublin, Terri and I rented a car and visited my relatives Kilkenny and Nenagh. It had been 36 years since my previous visit to Ireland and we vowed that we’d not let that much time pass before we visited again.

In today’s high tech job market, there doesn’t ever seem to be a good time to take a vacation. A high tech worker is expected to be fully engaged, working a full 8 hours (at least) at the office and then conducting conference calls in the evenings along with keeping ahead of the flood of email and maintaining aggressive program schedules. One of our previous CEOs described this mode as ‘Work whenever’ which we interpreted to mean ‘Never stop working’. So in this kind of environment a vacation usually presents a huge inconvenience, especially when you’re in the middle of a project. But if you don’t take a vacation eventually, you can find yourself with your vacation time at its ‘cap’ without being able to accumulate any more until you take some of what you’ve already accumulated. In the spring of 2006, both Terri and I were at our caps, so a vacation seemed like something we really needed to do to get back under our caps. We also felt an intense need to just get away from the hectic day-to-day pace.

Now that there are so many ways to communicate, it’s tempting to take along a laptop or cell phone just to keep tabs on things at work and make sure there are no fires blazing out of control as a result of one’s absence. But lugging a laptop and figuring out how and where to connect in the areas we’d be visiting didn’t seem conducive to the spirit of what we were trying to do, that is, to get away from the stress. So instead of taking a laptop, I provided one of my colleagues with a set of phone numbers where I could be reached just in case there was an emergency. I also took an HP PocketPC, primarily as an experiment to see if it would allow me to connect when I was in the vicinity of an open wireless access point. I had resigned myself that only true work emergencies would interrupt the vacation.

Next time I’ll discuss how we came about to visit so many places in the 17 days we were there along with the logistics of planning the trip.

Terri and I just got back from an amazing trip to Europe. We spend 17 days there and enjoyed every minute of it. I’d like to put together a more complete narrative of the trip, but here are some photos from Ireland and another set from Italy-Switzerland-Brussels-Amsterdam to look at while I put together something that helps to better describe what we did there.

Terri and I are planning a trip to Europe this summer. We were in Europe in 2003 for a tour of Scotland and Ireland which was wonderful. This time we’ll be spending a week in Ireland, visiting with my relatives and then will travel to Italy to visit with our friend Silvio and his family. Silvio visited with us last October. We’ve been to Italy several times before and we have always enjoyed our visits. We love the scenery, the food, the people, and just about everything about Italy. This time, we plan to see some of it on a motorcycle. We’ve rented small motorbikes before in Italy and traveled in Tuscany between Florence and Sienna and Pisa, and there’s just no better way to experience the countryside than on a motorcycle. This time Silvio will be arranging a more capable bike, a Honda VFR shown below, and we hope to take a trip up in through the Swiss Alps.

Silvio has proposed several routes for motorcycle trips so that we can make our decision based on where the weather is best. I’ve used Google Earth to view them in 3D and each of them look to be quite spectacular. The routes are shown below.

After Italy, we’ll be flying to Brussels, Belgium, and then taking a train to Amsterdam before returning home. I’ll make sure to take a lot of pictures.