Road-trip fitness

Living out of a suitcase for 23 days is a trick. Eating every meal at a restaurant is challenging, especially when each meal is in a new place where you are excited to try the local cuisine. Keeping fit took a conscious effort for us as a family.

Luckily, all of the tours we did in each city were ‘Walking tours’, and we made a point of not using taxis unless the distance we needed to cover was more than 3 miles. As a result, my fitbit showed an average of 7 miles per day, and that included our driving days. It was not uncommon for us to rack up more than 10 miles of walking in a single day, with our high day being about 13.

Alex and I had an additional goal – run at least one 5k in every country we visited. Some of these were outside, and some inside to avoid weather, or running on cobblestone streets (less fun than it sounds). We missed one country, Lithuania, due to only being there a single night, and being eager to get to Brno the next day. Minus Lithuania, we ran a min of 5k (~3.1 miles) in Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Czechia, Germany and Belgium.           

Food was much tougher… There were times when we ordered salads, but this was difficult to do when you were in a new place and really wanted to try to local specialties. The only thing you could do here was limit the portion sizes. Neither Laura nor I drink that much alcohol, but even this was difficult in a place like Brno that has some of the best beer in the world, and refers to itself as the beer capital of the world. Yes. Czechia is now home to my favorite beer.

As strange as this sounds, we had to be conscious of water. Unlike many countries, water is very high quality in more EU countries because of the strict EU requirements. The Baltic states have some of the best tasting water anywhere. The problem was that getting water outside of your hotel room is a bit of a challenge. Restaurants don’t readily serve it unless requested, and only ~8oz at a time (which they charge for). We got in the habit of simply requesting the “large water” which was about 750ml (wine bottle size), to which the wait staff would immediately know we were Americans. You can buy bottles of water in most any shop on the street, just make sure you translate the label to make sure you’re getting what you want - still or fizzy. For the most part, we each had our own water bottle that we’d fill as often as we could.