Off to Germany

Following the template we laid down last year, Oliver and I are off to Europe for a father-and-son trip over the March school break (with a few days thrown in on either side to give us enough time to breath).

Regular readers will recall that last year’s trip started in Slovakia and took us across the breadth of Europe through Vienna, Nuremberg, Paris and London. Rather than a long-term passion for Slovakia, the trip was inspired by a cheap 128 EUR two-for-one flight deal from the now-defunct SkyEurope airline. It was a great trip: the most stressful part of it was in Bratislava when the candy-bar machine ate our coins. But we put in some more coins and ended up with two candy bars. Which is to say that things went pretty well.

This year’s destination inspiration started with a random Google search that ended me up at Phaeno, a science centre in Wolfsburg, Germany that looked interesting. From there the trip grew west toward Düsseldorf, the new home of my old friend Pedro and his wife Patricia (as well as new friend João Santos, who I met at reboot last year). It’s also dangerously near Enschede in the Netherlands where friends Ton and Elmine live, but logistics will prevent us from connecting with them. 

And east toward Malmö, where, what being in Europe and all, it seemed like a good opportunity to pop by and see [[Olle]] and [[Luisa]].

In the middle of that all is Berlin, a city close to my heart and a place I’m eager to see with Oliver.

Join up the dots and you get a night 12 day saunter across northern Germany with a flick up to Sweden at the end. The Canadian dollar is worth 10 more cents against the Euro this year too, so our travel budget is slightly less stressed.

So we’re off tomorrow to London via Halifax and Montreal, and then it’s Düsseldorf for a day, Wolfsburg for the weekend, Berlin for most of next week, Malmö for the last weekend, and then back to Halifax via London. Back on the Island on March 22.

Our bags – one smallish backpack each so we can travel free and easy and carry-on – are packed and I’m in the final throes of cleaning up last-minute work and life ends (tiny soaps, last-minute Trac tickets, etc.).  It’s a laptop-free vacation, so if you want to play the home game the best way will be to follow along on twitter.com/ruk and on flickr.com/photos/reinvented.

And if you need to track me down (job offer, lottery winnings, server crash, selective service), here’s our itinerary.