Some people (namely, my dad) are real experts when it comes to foreign travel. Tickets, passports and vital documents will be neatly packed into a little wallet. Hi-vis jackets, spare bulbs, first-aid kits and God knows what will be safely stored in the car. Maps and routes will be meticulously planned months ahead of the journey and plenty of time will be left to get to your destination with bags of time to spare… Me and Tracy are not that type of person!!!
In the past we’ve left vital travel documents on a plane, we’ve paid a Spanish taxi driver almost £100 to race us to an airport in time, we’ve hurtled across France like Lewis Hamilton in a disperate attempt to catch our return train, we’ve left things behind at airport security, we’ve had things confiscated at airport security, we’ve got hopelessly lost on countless occasions and then there was Berlin, where we simply missed the flight altogether… To name just a few!!!
And in a few weeks time we’ve got another little adventure planned… We’re basically spending a few days driving down to Carcassonne near the French/Spanish border where we’ll stay for a week. We’re then going to spend another week driving home, via the south of France, into Milan for a few days, through Switzerland, into the Black Forest in Germany, into Luxemburg and finally into Belgium for a stop off in Bruge, before catching the ferry home.
As usual we’ve planned/cobbled and booked the whole thing on the Internet, we’ve got a massive pile of printed off hotel comfirmations and some very sketchy Google maps to guide us. This usually wouldn’t worry us too much, as we actually quite like that little spice that something might go a little bit wrong or we might get a wee bit lost somewhere along the way, but this year we’ve got friends coming along too and that adds a little bit of pressure for things to go smoothly. And ‘smoothly’ isn’t usually a word that most people would use to describe our travel exploits 😯
I am actually massively looking forward to our little jaunt around Europe, but just to add to my wee worries are the fact that I’m not entirely convinced that our 3 day Milan accomodation is genuine??? I’ve had confimation of our deposit payment, but all other email attemps I’ve made keep bouncing back 😯 And then there’s the small worry that I might not even have a passport to travel with!!! I’m still waiting for my new one to arrive in the post and the woman in the Post-Office told me that my new photo ‘might be ok‘, which basically gives me no time to re-apply if it gets rejected 😯
