How you can learn from my mistakes
Notes from day 16 of an epic European adventure
“Hej” from Stockholm (via London, Paris and Brussels)!
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We’ve packed a lot into this 18 day overseas adventure, so much so that it actually feels like a lot more than 18 days…and friends are surprised we are still here (literally daily getting messages like this ;)).
When we boarded the plane from London to Stockholm, I think all of us may have wished the plane was just going home but on we went!
But let me tell you - we are FRIED!
When I first booked this trip it looked very different. I found low-ish business class fares from NYC to Krakow (a city that’s always been high on my list) and from Stockholm to NYC (another city high on my list). The kids had been asking to go back to London, so the trip came together like this:
The trip (the first iteration):
NYC » Krakow (60K points per person on KLM)
Krakow » London (held off on booking this one way ticket but planned to pay cash)
London » Stockholm ($450 on Norwegian Air one way for our family of 4 including checked luggage, seats and priority boarding)
Stockholm » NYC (with a short layover in Amsterdam — 60K points per person on KLM)
The trip morphed over time as I wrote about in this post:
…and when we found a saver fare into Brussels, we shifted everything to stay a little closer to home and hopefully make the trip a little easier for us and the kids. Krakow was just feeling…far.
The trip (in its final iteration):
NYC » Brussels (via Amsterdam with an included train connection to Brussels - 60K per person each way on KLM.
Brussels » Paris (on the Eurostar because why not go to Paris and it’s half way?!)
Paris » London (on the Eurostar - much more of a pain than it once was thanks to Brexit 😥)
London » Stockholm ($450 on Norwegian Air one way for our family of 4 including checked luggage, seats and priority boarding)
Stockholm » NYC (with a short layover in Amsterdam — 60K points per person on KLM)
» Home (Friday! Soon!) ❤️
The pivots, mistakes, changes are all part of the trip for us but now that we’re on day 16, on this last leg of the trip, I have thoughts!
I also just want to take this moment to point out that if you’re looking to go to Europe, see this post here for my favorite saver fares to look for (regardless of the dates):
The tide turning towards home
There’s always that point of a trip where the tide shifts and you start to think about what you’re returning to back at home more than what you have ahead. Hi from that point of the trip!!
I’m already saving groceries to my cart, planning back to school gear for the kids (Max is starting a new school - middle school!), new shoes, backpacks and thinking through all the logistics of the new school routines and what’s left of the summer.
But when we boarded that plane from London, we had one last destination, so part of this I wrote from 10,000 feet en route to Sweden.
This trip has felt like A LOT in ways we hadn’t expected.
Here are a few things I’d do differently next time:
Space out the trips. Travel is cumulative. The kids attend regular school — but with all the school breaks and some attendance liberties — somehow we haven’t been home for more than a few weeks at a time this entire year.
There was Costa Rica in February, Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris in April, then Nashville, Savannah, Detroit and some weekend trips… the Virgin Islands, a weekend in the Hamptons and a few days later - this trip!
We head home in a few days and all I want to do (oddly?) is organize my house and maybe sit and stare at a wall for a while (preferably from my favorite chair).
A few days later we’ll head to a Bar Mitzvah in Detroit and then we’re HOME for a while! I’m ready for it. I love traveling and being on the go but can’t wait to unpack, settle in back at home and not be scrambling to plan the next trip.
I get really excited to book trips and imagine the places we could be, so I err on the side of “take the trip”. But, as the kids get older, some things get easier and some get harder. They have more opinions and we get a lot more pushback from them than we did when they were younger.
Typically, we like to take our big trip in July but with the big Virgin Islands family reunion trip planned for mid July I wrote about (no complaints but not our choice of dates!) we had to shift everything to still fit in one of our summer city adventures. It was too much. The kids are burned out, planning was hard to keep up with, and even though we return home in just two days, we’re still feeling a little unsettled knowing we don’t have a stretch at home before school starts.)
BUT I say all this with tiny violins playing — this has been an unforgettable adventure that I don’t regret! All trips have lessons to learn from so that’s what I’m focusing on here :)
Unstructured time on a trip can make a trip feel harder. I’m used to planning everything (and doing as much of that planning as possible ahead of time) but with so many back to back trips, and this trip taking us to places we’ve spent time in before, I didn’t plan as much as I usually do.
That felt freeing and fun as I imagined the trip, but, with kids (or at least my kids) the strolling around the city all day, see-what-we-find mentality didn’t fly. I spent a lot of time trying to make plans last minute and found myself totally exhausted early on in the trip, with a lot of trip ahead of us. It was hard to pace ourselves in the same way we usually do, while also trying to make plans on the fly with complaining kiddos in tow 😬
Next time I’d space out the trips and do more planning in advance, even if it’s just rough outlines of a day’s activities.
Pack smarter. I consider myself quite good at packing. I have a good system and plan way ahead but I am always striving to do better. I still pack things I never wear, run out of clothes too soon and never leave enough space to bring things home with us. This trip was tricky with a few hot cities and then Stockholm which ended up being much colder than it was projected to be when we left. We had planned to do back to school shopping back at home but had to swing by Zara/Uniqlo/H&M and buy some fall clothes just so we wouldn’t freeze while here. The highs are in the low 60s and we didn’t really even bring pants or jackets! In the meantime, there are 3 or 4 outfits I brought that I never wore and a couple pairs of shoes I could have left at home. I have a great packing system to make sure I never forget anything, but it requires knowing what I want to pack in advance. This trip was overwhelming to pack for having just returned from a beach trip. Next time I’d want to give myself more time and space to plan ahead.
So, to sum it up: you can travel too much, take it from me! But I still have no regrets - I have loved our time traveling this year and even though we can’t wait to be home, and I do plan to slow things down a little bit with the travel schedule going forward, I know we’ll miss these weeks of adventure.
And if you’ve read this far, I’ll let you in on one more secret… next time I’d probably skip Brussels and just start in Amsterdam or Paris :) No shade on Brussels, just wasn’t our favorite!
For my paid subscribers (love you!!) you can all look forward to some big trip reports for London, Paris and more as well as some upcoming detailed points and miles posts coming soon.
With a little less travel on the docket, I’ll have more time to process where we’ve been and how we got there — and share. I’m really looking forward to that ❤️
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Have any thoughts on this post or lessons you’ve learned from travel? Please share in the comments!