Where to begin??

So, Dave and I are sitting around the living room and I ask, "where do you want to go on vacation this summer?" He says "where would you like to go?"  My reply...Europe!  He agreed and the research began.

I started by buying a Rick Steves travel guide, Europe Through The Back Door.  It's the first I'd heard of Rick Steves.  After paging through the book I quickly found out that there was a lot more to this than just deciding what countries we wanted to go to and booking it!  The first thing we needed to decide was how long we could afford to be gone and what kind of vacation we wanted.  We decided that 2 weeks would be about as much time as we could give and we wanted to get a taste of as many countries/cities as possible rather than concentrating on just one or two countries.  We knew we wanted to hit Rome, Venice and Paris for sure and really had no desire to go to England. So we know where we want to go, now what?  How do we get from place to place. This is where I started to get overwhelmed... I'd heard about the Eurorail system and started looking into that.  In order to plan our trip using the rail system, I would need to know how long we'd be staying in each country and decide if we wanted to travel overnight or not as these both require different types of reservations.  I had no idea since I didn't even know how long we would want to stay in each country.  I decided to start somewhere else and look at hotels.  Again, I was overwhelmed  by the choices and decisions required...how do people do this?? I needed help! So I went to the travel agency where the women gave me a few booklets to look through and this advice: Keep an open mind to going on a tour. If you do it on your own you will be waking up in the morning, looking at each other and saying, "what do you want to do today" and waste time trying to decide where to go and keeping everyone happy.  If you take the rail system to get from place to place you will spend a lot of time trying to figure out where you need to be and when.  If you rent a car and drive from place to place, one of you will have your eyes on the road and one will be navigating, you'll probably end up arguing and the kids will be the only ones to enjoy the scenery! 

Dave and I had discussed tours and had ruled them out.  We didn't want to spend 14 days touring Europe with a bunch of people we didn't know.  But the travel agent's words made sense.  We would only have two weeks there and I didn't want to waste any of that precious time on things like rail schedules and road maps.  So as it turned out we found a tour that we are hoping will suit us perfectly and it just happens to be a Rick Steve's Tour! 

We chose the Family Europe in 14 Days Tour.  We start in Rome and then travel to Florence, Venice, Austria, Switzerland, Burghandy and Paris.  A little taste of everything without England (which a lot of the other tours included).  The selling points for this tour for us:
1.  It is for families and we have two daughters (15 and 12) who will be traveling with us.
2.  The travel group size is small compared to other tours, a maximum of 28 people.
3.  All hotel and transportation arrangements as well as museum and landmark tickets/tours are all taken care of for you.
4.  The biggest selling point for us...There is a lot of free time built in to the travel schedule. Most days start with a group breakfast and tour of the city or one of the local landmarks and then the afternoon and lunch we are free to roam around and have our own adventures. Half of the evenings we will have dinner with the group and the other half, again, we are on our own to decide where we want to go. There are even a few days built in where there is no scheduled tour at all, the entire day is ours to explore. 

A couple of other nice bonuses to the Rick Steves tour:  They reimburse you for your passport fees if you are getting a passport for the first time, so for us that meant $220 savings for our daughters' passports, and there is also a discount for paying your balance by check.  Just a couple of nice little extras, money in your pocket to spend on vacation!

Ok, so reading over this I realize I sound like an ad for Rick Steves.  Not my intent, just giving the reasons why we chose his tour.  Hopefully it will live up to our expectations.  Tune in to find out!

Why?

Why am I writing a blog?  After hearing we were going to Europe, a few friends have commented that they are interested in going as well and will "learn" from us after we take our trip. So I decided that this might be a good way to document the process, things I'm learning as I go along to do and not to do.  I've never blogged before, so not sure how this is going to go. Hopefully I won't bore you too much....here goes....