Semester Trip - Wrap Up

 I don't usually do a summary post for the trip, but this was a big one and it was fun to do a bit of a summary wrap up:

I'll start with top 3's:

The boys stated that their favorite parts were Postojna Cave, Prater Amusement Park and swimming in Lake Bled. Tomas also gave an honorary mention to Baredin Cave.

Mine were Postojna Cave, Lake Bled and Devín Castle in Bratislava.

Kristine's were Postojna Cave, Lake Bled and the mountains - both the Eagle's Nest and also the driving through, over and around the mountains as we travelled.

We all also agreed that Venice was a highlight and much better than expected.

Devín  Castle, Bratislava, Slovakia

Prater, Vienna, Austria

Postojna Cave, Slovenia

Lake Bled, Slovenia

Driving through mountains in Croatia

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The biggest stress (for me at least - even though Kristine was driving) was the tight roads and lack of parking in some of the areas - here's a brief sample of some of the places we drove/parked:

This is a googlemaps snap of the carpark for the beach in Rejika. There was a car parked in front of the small block of concrete by the building (its a public toilet), two motorbikes between the toilet and the fence and the gate was closed.  We had to travel down a long, narrow road and ended up here with no room to turn around, until someone finally moved the car in front of the toilet:

This is one of the roads we passed through in the mountains above Rejika - it was one of the wider ones. One of the big issues we found in Croatia was that cars parked almost anywhere, even double parked or in the middle of the road:

Yep - he is parked there

This is the car garage in Ljubljana - the car is about as far out to the right as it can go, due to other cars being parked there. The turning circle of our car BMW XC90 is listed as 11.8m with a length of 177.6cm and width of 192.3cm. This was not an easy job. Not to mention if you took too long, the elevator closed:

This is the carpark in Reijka:

This is the road we got stuck on in Czechia, in Kutna Hora and needed to reverse down - we got most of the way around the corner ahead:

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Things that surprised us the most:

We were all surprised by how mountainous Slovenia was, as well as Reijka. I had done a huge amount of research on what to see and do and looked at distances to towns etc when I booked everything, but I expected we could walk from our accommodation in Reijka to the main town - Nope! It was a very steep hill down!

Kris was surprised by how busy and how popular the Berlin Wall areas were still - and how its good that Germany shows and acknowledges the darker sides of its history.

Tomas was surprised by the caves. We all were shocked by how huge Postojna Caves were and the kids had only ever seen small caves in Australia and were not looking forward to what they thought would be a boring tour.

One thing that didn't shock me, but that I found really cool, was the presence of castles above the cities. Of course in medieval times the point was to be visible and threatening, but just looking up and seeing a castle above you is really cool.

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How do I plan out the trips?

Kristine and the kids give me a bit of grief about my level of planning. Kris is our driver, I'm the official planner and navigator and the kids just drink all the capri-sun juices and play Ipads.

I start with trying to get rough idea of what we want to see. I usually make up a few spreadsheets and open googlemaps to see where places are. This time I wanted to tick off a few countries that we hadn't explored yet and so Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia formed the start of the trip.

They are a fair way down in Europe and it would have been a long drive. We have done 12, 14 even 16 hour drives before, but it's not the most fun for a holiday, so I tried to keep our drives to 2-3 hours with an occasional big trip when needed.  I'd heard a lot about the Sedlec Ossuary in Czechia and that was on the way, so I added that to the list. We also didn't remember much about Prague, Vienna or Salzburg so I thought it would be a good chance to see them. The Eagle's Nest had also always been a place I was interested in, so I added that to the list.

Eventually I got a skeleton of a trip. I then searched google for "Things to see in XX" for the towns and areas and checked what struck me. I made some lists of places and, being a castle nerd, I also searched for best castles in Europe and noted down some that were along the way - Devin, Trakoskan and Hluboka were ones that came up.

I decided on Ljubliana and Bratislava so we could visit Slovenia and Slovakia and a search came up with the Postojna caves. I also wanted to do some of Croatia and the shorefront, so that's how we came up with Reijka, Krk and Pula.

I was originally going to head to Trieste after Pula, but Kris suggested Venice, so we worked that in.

Once everything was put in skeleton form, I created a rough itinerary and started putting times and dates to the locations. Here's one of my original lists - you can probably see some places that stayed and some that changed:

I also created a word document with some pictures of the highlights to run it by Kris to make sure she was happy. Here's the page for some of what we missed in Klagenfurt and Trieste:

Eventually I had the completed timeline and plan, so I started looking for accommodation. I generally use Booking.com but I had trouble finding a place in Salzburg so I went to Airbnb.

Once I have all the booking in place I then create my travel pack. This is all of our prepurchased tickets (ferry, Eagle's Nest, Postojna Caves etc), a page for each place we are staying with address, phone number and check in times, and a detailed list of what we are going to see in each place. I also created a history document, that gave some details on each of the landmarks so I could explain to the kids what we were actually looking at.

Here's an example of the one I did for our France Trip:

and the history:

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We ended up changing a few things on the fly on the trip.  First, we switched Leipzig for Berlin on the way back. We also toured Pula in the afternoon earlier than planned, which gave us time to do Baredin Cave and to also go into Venice in the evening.

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So what is next?

With school and work starting back up again, travel will need to slow down a bit. We have rugby games coming up on the weekends in August as well as finals and the Rugby USM tournament in Sepetember.

Alana and her friend are coming to visit in December, so we also need to plan for that.

I'd still like to visit the Swedish Island of Ven, find some more of the Tomas Dambo trolls in Denmark, visit Latvia and see a little more of Sweden.

For longer trips we'd all love to see Greece and I've also sketched up a rough idea of a trip that does some of the Netherlands, Belgium and included Flander's Field and Dunkirk.  We also have yet to visit Spain and I have the town of Carcassonne in southern France on my list. At some point we need to head back to England to watch a football match and so Tomas can finally ride the Nemesis.  So much to do, and so little time to do it in!