Lessons in road-tripping

I’ve waited to blog about this until the end, but now that we’re done and have had time to reflect, I figured I’d share some notes on what we learned on our great EU road-trip.

When Laura, Alex and I would roll into a new city and country for the first time, we’d immediately do a few things:

• Learn the word for “Thank you” in the local language”

• Find the local price for gas (prices varied wildly on our trip)

• Locate the hotel parking

• Confirm the local currency (not all EU countries are on the Euro)

• Find the best food options within walking distance of the hotel

• Find a local tour guide

Like any other traveling, learning to speak some of the local language is a very good thing; more so when you’re driving yourself. On a road-trip, you don’t have an itinerary where there’s always someone with you when you change hotels or need local transportation. You need to figure this out on your own, which usually involves communicating with the locals. We are very fortunate that most of the world uses English as a second language, but that’s not always true, and not always spoken happily by the locals. That said, putting in a little effort to learn a few words in the local language goes a long way to showing people you’re at least making an effort to be a good traveler in their city. By far, the best word/phrase we’ve found to start with is “Thank you”. As a family, we made it a priority to learn this as soon as we crossed a border into a new country. More than once, we found ourselves in a small town where no one spoke English and we had to wholly rely on the patience of locals as we fumbled our way through google translate to buy gas, or order in a restaurant. People were generally nice to us, but would be a little friendlier if we could at least say, “Thank you” in their language.

Netherlands: Bedankt

Belgium (Northern Flemish): Bedankt

Denmark: Tak skul du have

Norway: Takk skal du ha

Sweden: Tack

Finland: Kiitos

Estonian: Aitah

Latvian: Paldies

Lithuanian: Aciu

Polish: Dziekuje

Czech: Dekuji

German: Danke

Parking in Europe is a pain. In general, Europe does not share the same reliance on cars that we have in the US. I’ll write about this more in a blog specific to driving in Europe, but one of the most unpleasant problems is parking. Our need to park our car dictated what hotels we could stay in and required substantial research ahead of our trip. Many hotels simply do not have parking other than a public garage that can be located a few kilometers away. Even worse, most hotels advertise first-come-first-served parking for the limited spots they have available. In at least one location, we literally got the last spot available, and were present to hear later guests arrive and find out the hotel’s 12-spot parking garage was already full.

I suppose the Euro has made traveling in Europe a little easier, but there are still some gotchas. Not all member countries in the EU use the Euro. On our trip, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland and Czechia still rely on their national currency. When you travel on a tour, this is seldom a problem as you’re always in tourist-ie areas that always take American credit cards. On a road-trip, this is not always the case. There’s nothing worse that pulling over after 4 hours of driving and finding out the toilet needs a 50 Kroner coin that you don’t have… and can’t get without first finding an ATM. Our goal was always to avoid obtaining local currency, but I’m pretty sure we did in each of the non-Euro countries. At the end of our stay, the remainder was always a generous tip we left for the hotel maids.

Food... arguably one of the best parts of traveling is experiencing locals foods. Wherever we went, there were always "American" food options available, but some of the best meals we had were when we ventured far from the beaten path to find the restaurants the locals frequented. I will admit that some of the foods looked less than exciting, but I don't think there was a meal we didn't enjoy, with some of the less attractive meals being among our favorites. If you're really a foodie, local food tours are an excellent way to go. Often times these tours took us through some of the local outdoor markets where street vendors cooked on the spot. A salmon filet in a Helsinki open air market might be the best any of us had ever had... at the outlandish price of ~$12.

Probably the most important task we realized when getting to a new place was to find a local tour guide. Although you can explore a new city on your own, these cities are mostly designed to filter tourists into the local shopping district… which is seldom where you find the most interesting things to see and learn. Our best source for finding a great local guide was a website Laura found, withlocals.com. Towards the end of our trip we learned how to maximize time with a local guide. The best thing we found was to meet them at a local café where you could sit for 20-30 minutes just getting to know them. Find out how long they’ve lived in the city, what their family history is, and what their best experiences are. We had some amazing conversations and learned far more than the typical tourist spiels they normally recite. For the most part, people are very proud of their homes and will tell you anything you want to know.