102 Days In Europe

We have spent the last 3.5 months traveling through the Netherlands, Belgium, England, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Italy, France, Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro. Whew!

ON EUROPE…

 

We have experienced amazing things. The biggest of cities and the smallest of villages. Ancient ruins and modern public art. Great food and drink. Wooden clogs and flamenco heels. Tulips and lavender. Cold and hot. Royal palaces and former war zones. Nature’s wonders. Planes, buses, cars, gondolas, boats, chairlifts, trains, trams and trolleys.

It really is amazing to see firsthand how many different cultures are packed together in such a small area. Basic things like food, dress, language, customs, and personalities change drastically just by crossing an imaginary line. Sometimes – like in Italy – they’re even more drastic within the imaginary lines.

As we progressed through Europe from England to Spain and Italy, a lot of what we learned in South America really came into perspective. For example, dates and names we had heard about while visiting Inca ruins made a lot more sense when we got to Spain. It was a good reminder of how interconnected the world really is.

Europe is advanced – in many ways more so than the United States. But there have still been things that have baffled us. Life’s simple expectations that we have as Americans just do not exist over here…like shower curtains, free tap water, double beds, pre-cut pizzas, washcloths, adequate coin circulation, cold beer, mounted shower heads, free bathrooms, drivers who don’t swerve into oncoming traffic, train tickets that actually show the train number and departure time, and construction sites that are closed to the public. 

It seems that everything in Europe is either under construction or “under restoration”. It’s hard not to find a main attraction that isn’t partly covered in scaffolding. What’s unbelievable is that places still charge full-price to see something even if you can’t see it…and they don’t tell you in advance! In 10 years I guess I’ll have to come back to see that restoration work I paid for.

In honor of the ridiculous number of churches that we’ve passed through, here are our top picks:

Favorite big church #1: Sagrada Familia (Barcelona, Spain)

Favorite big church #2: Siena (Italy)

Favorite small church: Bled (Slovenia)

We have completely lucked out when it comes to being in Europe during epic sporting events. From the moment we landed in Amsterdam all the way through Florence, we enjoyed 3 whole months of European soccer championships and the Euro Cup – played every 4 years on an alternating schedule with the World Cup. We were the worst fair-weather fans of all time…cheering for whichever country we happened to be in at the moment. There was a televised game every night and the restaurants would wheel big screen TVs into the squares for everyone to watch while they dined.

Have you ever wondered which Olympic sports other countries watch on TV? I did, but then it got old after one day. NBC has censored us by blocking all online videos from being shown outside of the US. So at first we were forced to watch what the Croatians deem important….ping pong and handball. Finally we got to some places with satellite TV and saw cool events like triathlon, marathon, tennis, gymnastics, swimming, and track and field (which they call “athletics”). Still, I miss Bob Costas and his crazy toupee.

Have I mentioned that European “beaches” are 99% rocks? Sure I have, but I’ll rant about it again. How can an entire developed continent – which enjoys all of life’s other luxuries – put up with this? I mean honestly, after laying on rocks for 30 minutes it looks like you have a skin disease. Americans, please, get out there and enjoy your sandy beaches. Frolic on them. Roll around in them. Take a nap on them simply because you’re so damn comfortable. I’m not sure we realize how good we have it.

European cars are like micro-machines. 

At any given time, Europeans (more specifically in the Mediterranean) are either holding a cigarette or an ice cream cone.

If European fashion is any sort of precursor to American fashion, then I predict that Birkenstocks will be making a comeback. They were everywhere in Italy. That’s right, the shoe of 1997 is back. This has made me realize that I have now reached the age when I can spot 15-year fashion cycles.

If the French get their way, chic fanny packs are right around the corner. Prepare yourselves.

Europe. It’s a real class act.

ON OUR STATE OF WELL-BEING…

While watching the Opening Ceremonies, I had a startling realization. The TV was on mute, and when I would sporadically glance over at the parade of athletes, I could correctly identify the country within 3 seconds solely by seeing the flag bearer’s face. I realized how much I had broadened my horizons.

Before getting to Europe, fellow travelers had scared us about the quality of the hostels and the lack of Internet. Neither of these turned out to be a problem at all. Our other major worry was the heat. This was a problem, and there were some days I thought I might go crazy. It was particularly hot in Spain, Italy and Croatia, but we powered through.

Trip planning in Europe was so much harder than in South America. In countries like Bolivia, there may only be 3 or 4 cities that 90% of people visit. That makes it easy because it’s fairly obvious what to choose. In Europe everything is so nice that there are endless options. That was difficult for us because (1) we didn’t have time to research everything and (2) we can be a bit indecisive.

While we were still vigilant throughout Europe, it’s been more relaxing to know that we didn’t have a bullseye on our bags. People weren’t waiting to steal our stuff at any moment. We could actually go into the ocean at the same time together, which is something we didn’t feel like we could do in Brazil.

Here’s a funny thing about communicating…you don’t necessarily need to speak a country’s language. You just need to be able to speak their back-up language. We managed to get by in Italy and France and counted our blessings that we are from an English-speaking country. But if you’re from Russia, what do you do? We have no clue.

I have an ice cream problem. I’ve had so much of it that I’ve become dependent. At the end of the day, I crave ice cream like a gainfully employed adult craves a glass of wine.

On a related note, several people have commented about Steve’s weight loss. On our flight to the Aran Islands in Ireland, our plane was so small that they had to weigh us to balance out the plane. This was when Steve discovered that he’s lost thirty pounds since we left San Diego! Everyone’s reaction has been pretty unanimous…nobody thought he had anything to lose. From the sweets of Belgium and the fried food of Great Britain to the tapas of Spain and the carbs of Italy, we have eaten well. This just goes to show what getting out from behind your cubicle desk can do. We walk a lot. Activity…it’s good stuff.

We’ve been traveling for 6 months now and the wear and tear on our equipment is starting to show. Halfway through Italy all of our stuff started to break. The zipper on my backpack spontaneously combusted, my flip flop blew out, and the sole on my running shoe is peeling back. To make matters really worse, the flash on our camera stopped working, our iPhone freezes, the iPhone case cracked, the Kindle case ripped, and the ‘h’, ‘g’, apostrophe and backspace keys are our laptop intermittently decide they need a day off. All of these technology problems are not good news for a pair of flashpackers.

These tribulations just been magnified by the fact that we’ve been moving so quickly the last 2 months…changing cities sometimes almost every night. Lately we have been feeling more stressed out than we think we should be for having a year off.

We’ve made mistakes – especially in Italy – with trains, hotels, tolls, and the Dolomites hiking mishap. We chalk it up to how fast we’ve been traveling. We set a blistering pace for ourselves that we just haven’t been able to keep up with. It’s been a reminder that we really didn’t know what we were doing when we first planned our trip. We wanted to try out different paces to see what we liked. This was a test, and we learned a valuable lesson about what our limits are. Steve said it best, “The last month and a half has been fun but hard. If we were to keep up this pace, it would be hard to have fun.”

In the midst of all this madness, we’ve also had annoyances back at home. We’ve basically had to evict our tenants in San Diego and we were victims of credit card fraud – in the US of all places. Lately we’ve felt like we’ve gone through a gauntlet of bad luck. We completely expected to have some low points on our trip. After all, you can’t have the highs without the lows, right? We are trying to get our balance back in order.

In the exact same way that we felt three months ago when we left South America, we are ready to go but a little scared to leave. We’ve learned that 3 months is about the limit for how much time we can spend in one continent before getting stir crazy. When we arrived in our final city of Kotor in Montenegro and we weren’t marveling, we knew it was time to move on from Europe. This city deserved to be marveled at. At the same time, we have learned the European system. We’re in our comfort zone (as much as that’s possible), and the thought of starting over is daunting and scary.

But then we remind ourselves that we’ve done it before and we can do it again. Hey, it’s springtime in Australia! A fresh start sounds perfect.

OUR FAVORITE PICTURES

Haste Ye Back

Golf is one side of Scotland, but there is also so much more to enjoy. Over 9 days we drove about 900 miles around the country, taking in cities and countryside.

We thought we saw a lot of castles in Ireland, but we saw even more in Scotland. We visited so many – Stirling, Urquhart, Dunrobin, Balmoral, Glamis, Edinburgh, Dirleton, and

St. Andrews – and yet they all felt very different. Some are ruins while others are still in use by the families. 

At Dunrobin Castle, we met a professional falconer who had an impressive family of hawks, falcons and owls. These birds can get up to 200 MPH in a dive. They were so well trained that, on command, they would fly from the rafters of the castle into the gardens right over your head….and by that I mean that their wings actually hit Steve in the head.

Balmoral Castle is really more of a hunting lodge and still used today by the Royal Family as their Scottish summer home. Unfortunately there were no royal sightings, but we did get to see the Queen’s glitzy dresses as part of a special Jubilee exhibit.

Urquhart Castle is set up in the Scottish Highlands, a beautiful section of the country full of mountains and lakes which the Scottish call “lochs”. 

Our favorite lake was easily Loch Ness – famous for its lake monster, Nessie.

While we were walking around the ruins at Urquhart Castle, I spotted this out of the corner of my eye. It could have been Nessie or it could have been the wake from a speedboat…but I’m pretty sure it was Nessie.

The Highlands are full of very endearing wildlife like Highland Cattle and Shetland Ponies.

Game hunting is very popular in Scotland, so we ate a variety of the local catch – rabbit, pheasant, venison and quail. We also ate a lot of weird stuff like ox tongue, pig’s head, and haggis. Haggis is the national dish of Scotland. The ingredients are sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, minced with oatmeal, spices, etc. and then stuffed into the sheep’s stomach. It sounds absolutely awful, but actually, it’s not that bad to the taste! The Scotts seem to serve haggis any time of the day, but we always had it in the morning as part of a Scottish Breakfast.

To wash it all down, we sampled a number of single malt whiskeys, which are famously distilled here in Scotland.

I thought Scotland had really great towns. I would have liked to spend more time in cities like Inverness and North Berwick going into the kilt and scarf shops looking at the endless patterns of plaid, or “tartan” as they call it.

One day we took the train into Edinburgh, which is Scotland’s beautiful Gothic capital city.

In addition to Edinburgh Castle and the Royal Mile, we saw the coffee shop where J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books and the graveyard where she took inspiration for a lot of her characters’ names. It was a rainy and cold day, but we really liked Edinburgh. Someday I’ll return to spend another 2 or 3 days exploring. 

The Scottish people have the best, best, best accents! I may only be able to understand about 60% of what they’re saying, but I could sit forever listening to them talk. There is a Scottish saying, “Haste Ye Back”, which basically means “hurry up and return”. Will do. Since the start of our trip, this is the first country that we both agree we want to dedicate more time to in the future. Scotland, you can count on us to haste ourselves back.

The Home of Golf

Scotland is the home of a lot of things – clans, tartans, kilts, bagpipes, but most of all golf. So anyone who knows my family can appreciate why this is a special country for us to visit. We couldn’t possibly lug four sets of clubs with us everywhere, but we did take advantage of the country’s rich golf history with stays at some of the most hallowed courses.

For Dad’s retirement celebration, we started at Turnberry along the western Ayrshire Coast.

Turnberry has a beautiful hotel set on top of a hill overlooking their famous golf course and Alisa Craig – a large crag in the sea where curling stones are mined.

At 6:30 every night, a bagpiper marches up and down the grounds of the hotel with the course and sea set as the backdrop.

Turnberry also has an adorable 12-hole pitch & putt course. We held a couple of family competitions under the shadow of the hotel.

From Turnberry we headed north to the Scottish Highlands and stayed in a stylish country B&B in a small town called Dornoch – the birthplace of the world’s most famous course architect, Donald Ross. It took us a couple of days to figure out that we were actually staying in his sister’s old house!

At almost 58°N, Dornoch is the most northern we will reach on our entire 11-month trip.

It’s a Bremer family tradition that when in Dornoch, you have to wade into the North Sea at night. So at 11:00pm – while it was still light outside – we wound our way through the golf course to the beach for a chilly dip.

After Dornoch we headed to the southeast of Scotland, known as the Mecca for golfers. We stayed in a boutique hotel called Greywalls which is situated inches from the 10^th tee of Scotland’s most exclusive golf club, Murfield. Players must wear a coat and tie into the Murfield clubhouse before they change into their golfing clothes. Women can’t even enter the premises, yet we saw two pooches on the course.

At Greywalls we celebrated our family’s two April birthdays – Mom and me. We stayed in the old doorman cottages that flank the gates as you drive onto the property.

On our last morning, we held a couple’s “country club triathlon” which consisted of a contest in the sports of croquet, grass-court tennis, and putting.

We were tied going into the last hole, and in the end, my parents legitimately beat us.

By the way, have you ever seen croquet mallets that big before? We have photographic proof that Arnold Palmer used the same ones at Greywalls back in the 80s.

Our last major golf stop was to the town where the game originated: St. Andrews. This is a course that I grew up watching on TV, and I've always wanted to come here.

The amazing thing about the Old Course at St. Andrews is that it’s the most famous golf course in the world, and yet it's so incredibly accessible. At any time throughout the day you can stand feet from the 1^st tee or 18^th green or walk across the fairway to get a picture on the Swilcan Bridge.

St. Andrews is public land, so on Sundays they shut the golf down so that people can walk and picnic on the world’s most prestigious course!

Right along the 1^st fairway is a fun putting complex called The Himalayas. The holes are long and seriously hilly. We played 54 holes in one and a half days.

All of the golf resorts that we visited are amazing. Really, they are top-notch. But the four of us agreed...our favorite memories were of our family competitions puttering around Scotland.