European Vacation 2022 is a Go!

It was definitely later than I’d like to start planning, and we’re paying a bit more in airfare because of that, but our family European vacation is all lined up now. (And really, it’s hard to tell if I’m paying more for airfare or not. Trying to guess what the prices are going to do is very difficult this summer, between oil prices and war in Ukraine and the ever-present COVID dilemma. In the end, I just bought the tickets and decided to just be okay with the fact that prices might come down a bit at some point between now and then. They could just as easily go up, so . . . )

This time around, we’re going to give trains a shot. We kept trying to find a good airfare between Rome and Vienna, and I just wasn’t comfortable with anything we found. The tickets were either on one of Europe’s super budget airlines, or else they were at obnoxious times. I really didn’t want to just cross my fingers that CheapAir would actually fly the day we wanted it to, and then I discovered that one way tickets on the train from Vienna to Venice are about $20. Total.

So here’s how the fun’s going to go down this time:

• Denisa’s leaving with the fam about a week before I do. I couldn’t justify taking so much vacation all at once. They’re going to fly from Boston to Prague, and then take the train to Trenčín.
• A week later, I’m flying from Boston to Vienna, where Denisa will meet up with me, and we’ll hang out in the city for a couple of days. We’ll then travel to Slovakia. Not sure yet if we’ll get a car for that leg of the trip or not. It all depends on where we want to go. My thought at the moment is that we’ll check out Bratislava with the fam, something we’ve never really done.
• On the way back, we’ll stay in Vienna for a night with the fam, since our train leaves at 6am the next morning for Venice.
• For the Italian vacation, we’re doing 2 nights in Venice, 2 nights in Milan (with a day trip to Lake Como), 3 nights in Florence (with expeditions to Cinque Terra and Pisa), and 4 nights in Rome. For all of that, we’re going to be traveling by train. I did it for 2 years when I was 20 years old. It can’t be that much harder with a family, right? 🙂 (It’ll actually be great practice for Tomas, who will no doubt be doing a fair bit of train travel in the near future.)

I’ve got the plane tickets purchased and the hotels mostly reserved. Still have to figure out the exact logistics of getting from one city to the other, but we have time. I’m excited to be going over again. It’ll have been four years, but it feels like about ten.

Anyone out there have any hot tips on what to do in Venice, Milan, Florence, and Rome?

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