My parents have always wanted to take a trip to Europe. They have been looking forward to this “Europe Trip” for the past 10 years. But with two kids, panning is a necessity. What age is the best age to take your kids? You don’t want to take them too young, because they won’t be able to appreciate anything. On the other hand, you can’t wait until they are too old and have their own families to worry about. My parents decided that the “right time” was when I was 17 and my brother was 14. It was the summer before my senior year. We planned to go to Honfleur, Normandy, Mont Saint-Michel, Paris, Rome, and Venice thought a two week vacation, spending no more than 4 days in each city.
Now if you’re thinking we ran this vacation like any other family, you’re wrong. Not only did we visit 6 different cities and 2 countries within two weeks, we also did this without suitcases. Have you ever seen those crazy tourists walking around with camping backpacks? You know, those backpacks that always seem bigger than the person carrying it? You watch like 3 people go by and then a few seconds later you see a straggler dragging their huge backpack, trying to catch up. Well that was my family!
The backpacks that we used for our two week trip.
Summer comes and we have everything ready. Our backpacks are all lined up, our itinerary is planned, and the doggies are taken care of. We drive to the Orlando International Airport to catch a 4:00 plane that will take us to Philadelphia before going on to Paris. BUT we encounter the first of many challenges in our trip less than an hour in. Due to the rather predictable afternoon showers that Central Florida gets almost everyday, our plane to Philadelphia is delayed. This means that we wont be able to make our Philadelphia to Paris connection. So basically because of the rain, we don’t get to go to Europe.
So now what do we do? We waited until we could finally get on our plane to go to Philadelphia. Once we got to Philadelphia, we ran as fast as we could through the terminal to get to the gate of out next plane. (I’m sure we got tons of crazy looks, with those backpacks and all). As we are running up to the gate we see the plane moving towards the runway….pretty much the most dramatic moment of the day. So what are our options now? We could stay overnight in Philadelphia and try and get a plane to Paris tomorrow, but that means losing a whole day of our precious time in Europe. Instead we tried to see if we could get on ANY other flight going to Europe. We finally found a plane that was leaving from Philadelphia to Dublin, and then from Dublin to Paris. We take it, and before we know it we are going through customs in Ireland. Fortunately we encounter no problems in Ireland and we arrive in Paris almost 12 hours behind schedule. But hey, it could have been a lot worse. We get in the car and we are off on our European Adventure…
Looking out the window on the way to Ireland
The European Adventure 
I’ve always have wanted to go to Europe. My family has yet to go on vacation there but they say that we may go within the next two years. When we do, I definitely want to back pack instead of bringing a bunch of luggage.
This trip must have been a blast, can’t say I’m not jealous. I would love to visit Europe and I plan on it eventually. I literally want to tear through the entire continent because I want to see everything. I plan on doing a semester abroad in either London or Italy possibly in my Junior year at FSU.