Kidding Around Europe

Here we are, getting ready to take the kids and head off to Europe with our two small children. The Grand Tour begins.

Nottingham Castle, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, punk rock scene… Nottingham is vibrant and interesting and a great place to have started our adventures in Europe.

Our time in England is done and we traveled down on the Midlands train to London and took the Eurostar to Belgium. This is Dominica’s first time in Continental Europe.

More of Belgium. After spending some time in Bruges, I had a work event to attend in Antwerp so the family took the train to the northern edge of the country and spent the day in the country’s largest city. In our next episode we will be arriving in Germany!

On to the third country of the Grand Tour: Germany (we only passed through France by the train, so we won’t count it until we return to actually see it in a few episodes.) We have arrived in Boppard, on the River Rhine in Western Germany.

Heading south from the Rhineland in Germany we head to Alsatian France to the historic walled town of Neuf-Brisach on Swiss Rail (SBB). An amazing rail journey and an interesting bus ride into the German-speaking region of France and one of the core areas of my family heritage.

We are continuing our time in the Alsace region of eastern France and today we are taking the bus from Neuf-Brisach to the famous tourist town of Colmar full of canals and historic areas.

Bartenheim, in the southern Alsace, is our third and final destination within the Alsace region of France and was not a location that we had planned to see. Our planned hotel in the area closed and we were forced to find an alternative location at the last minute. Bartenheim ended up being an amazing location for launching into Switzerland from the west.

Bern, the capital of Switzerland, is a very special location for me as this is the city most identified with my family. This is the closest thing that I have to an ancestral city. Bern is an amazing, beautiful city and we were able to visit it by train from our hotel in Bartenheim, France.

Today we travel all the way across Switzerland. We leave our hotel in Bartenheim, Alsace, France. But first, our thirteen month old daughter has a fever and we get to experience legendary French healthcare first hand in our first ever “outside of the USA” experience with doctors and it is truly eye opening. From there, we head to a brief stay in Switzerland’s largest city and financial capital of Zurich.

Luciana is still a little sick, still with a fever, as we continue our time in Switzerland. Today we are heading west again to see Luzern, or Lucerne.

I give the family the evening off in Regensdorf and I head into Zurich downtown to see David Ahearn from Northern Ireland for drinks and talk about life in Switzerland. We had worked together on Wall Street many years ago. We had a good evening but then I had the adventure of being abandoned in Zurich without transportation, or a charge on my phone! Sunday night is not the time to get stranded in Zurich.

We start today traveling north by train to Munich from Zurich. But we have a true train issue today and we end up traveling across Europe on the wrong train.