Europe! (an introduction)

This is the first post in a series about our travels in October-November 2012.  I am posting these belatedly (in March 2013) but putting them in their proper chronological place on my blog so as not to disturb the current flow of recent blog posts.

I thought it would be fun to post about our travels in Europe and the UK for two reasons: firstly, because it was a fantastically fun trip and it's fun to remember (and I was disappointed not to have the chance to blog at all during the trip), and secondly, because I thought you never know -- maybe someone out there will be inspired or encouraged that it is possible to take crazy trips when you have small children.  (Or maybe they will just think we are crazy. :D)  Or maybe someone will be motivated to see the beauties of Europe while they can still get a student fare on train, or a discount advance fare.  Or maybe people will just enjoy reading our adventures.  :)

There is one blog post which you should read before this one: the Pre-Journey: the Girls Go to Livingstone.  :)

Now you may be wondering: why Europe??  How could we afford it?  Why did we decide to go there?  Well, the main reason we decided to go there was because my father, who is retired USA military, is able to fly for free to any USA base in the world, on military transport planes.  He can bring all his dependents with him, too!  My family traveled this way in October 2010 when they came to visit us in Scotland -- first flying to a military base in Germany and then from there taking a budget flight to Edinburgh.  This awesome military benefit means that it is affordable for my parents to travel - but also to bring their 4 dependent children along with them!

So David and I had always been talking about taking a family holiday in Europe, back when we lived in the UK - because it is so easy and so inexpensive to get across to the Continent from the UK.  But it didn't happen while we were living in Scotland, and now here we were living in Zambia.

However, we knew we would be returning to the UK for the break at the end of the year, so we decided to arrange a couple of weeks of holiday at the beginning of our 3 months in Scotland.  BUT... our flight back to the UK had a stop-over in Amsterdam.  The idea finally came to us (thanks to our dear friend Mairi who was quicker to realize than we were!) that it would make a lot of sense to just get off the plane in Amsterdam, skip the final leg to Glasgow, and instead travel wherever we wanted to in Europe!  We picked our destination in Europe based on where it would be easiest for my family to meet us, because we really wanted to see them.  It's sad living so far from grandparents!  There is a large military base in Naples, Italy, which was why we picked Italy as our destination.

Our flight was directly from Lusaka to Amsterdam, and from there we would be traveling by train across Europe to Italy.  We looked into flying budget airlines, but budget airlines are actually only any good if you are flying during peak times of year!  Our holiday time is 'off peak' and it's so much cheaper to do things that way... except fly.  No holiday airlines are going to Rome, or anywhere else in Italy, at the end of October.  We did research for months.  What if we flew from Amsterdam into a different European airport and then took a shorter train ride?  Nope, that didn't save any money.  If we flew a big airline like BA or KLM, we had to pay for our children.  Train travel across Europe definitely saved us money because we didn't have to pay ANYTHING for the children (most train and bus companies in Europe won't make you pay for children until they are 3-5 years of age, it varies obviously).

So much of our research was done via via the amazing website seat61.com which we found absolutely invaluable.  Check it out!  This website is the way we found out about booking advance fares on trains to save a ton of money!  You REALLY have to jump - we booked as soon as the 90-day window was open and still missed a couple of the cheapest fares, so we did end up paying a bit more than we had been hoping for, but we still got fairly good fares.  (If your travel dates are completely flexible, you can get awesomely good fares - our dates were only a little bit flexible because of the dates my family was available to meet us in Italy, which meant we did have to take the more expensive options to get the tickets we needed on a couple of occasions.)  And even better, seat61.com gave us the confidence that we COULD actually pull off a train trip across Europe, as complete novices to Europe, with two small children.

So that's an introduction to Europe -- how we managed to afford it, and why we chose to go there in the first place.  Maybe I've missed a detail you want to know about?  If so, share it in the comments! The next post in this series is Our Weekend in the Netherlands.  :)