Visa joy!


We're leaving for Europe in 11 days!  We were right to cast our fate upon the mercies of the French bureaucracy:  our visas arrived today in record time, and we are good to go. 

The dogs know something is up. They dog our every step, anxious at the appearance of suitcases. Neither has any real idea how much their lives are about to change. 

Darwin will be staying with friends in Charlottesville, getting to be an only dog for half a year (something he yearns for every day!), while Jacob will spend an evening wedged into a tiny carrier, shoved under an airplane seat for eight hours, and then greet an unexpectedly early dawn in Germany. After that, until mid-August, he will be a constant companion on our journey - doing what he loves best, being with his people, riding in the car, and exploring new places. 



Our itinerary:  We arrive in Frankfort Thursday morning, spend the day shopping for kitchen essentials, resting and getting over jet lag. On Friday morning, we pick up the campervan and begin our 20-hour sprint southward to springtime. We'll spend at least one night on the road, in Lyon, France, but our destination is a campground near Granada, in Andalusia, Spain. After that, who knows? We'll drift with the wind, following spring as it moves up the continent. The goal of this trip is to have no goals. Our plan is to be unplanned. As two hyper-planners, we may find this to be a challenge, so wish us luck! If we fail, we will have ignored the plan - a win-win! 

That said, we'd love suggestions. Have you been to (or wished you had) any places in Europe that we should consider visiting? 



P.S. - I've been researching steadily, and have discovered some interesting facts:
  • Traffic laws are different in every country. For instance, if you have bikes on the back of a vehicle in Italy or Spain, you need a reflective sign on them. You can't carry bikes on the back of a vehicle in Portugal at all. (I guess ours will ride inside for a while.) We'll be studying the rules as we go. 

  • It is generally illegal in most European countries to: turn right on red, drive in the left lane without passing, pass in the right lane, drive with headlights off, talk on a hand-held cellphone, drive with any blood alcohol level.

  • Dogs may travel across most of Europe with a rabies certificate, a microchip and a European Pet Passport. However, a tapeworm treatment is required for entry into the UK, Finland or Norway. (Jacob the dog advocates avoiding these countries, but he has been out-voted.)









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Into Outer Mongolia

Image
(Pictures below, if you're impatient) Mongolia is, as you might imagine, like nothing we've seen before. We spent two days in the city of Ulaanbaatar, visiting museums and exploring the downtown area. The highlight for me of those first two days was a visit to a school of traditional music, where a very talented young throat singer demonstrated his singing and playing the horsehead fiddle for us. After the performance, he gave me a lesson in throat singing, and I was able to achieve the first stage! It sounds harsh, but really feels open and easy when you get it. On the way out of the school, we met two little girls who had arrived for their Mongolian harp lesson. They gave us an impromptu concert in the lobby. One turned out to be from Ireland; her parents send her back to her grandparents in Mongolia every summer to learn her culture.  On the third day, we headed out into the countryside in six four-wheel-drive trucks to begin our 2,500km odyssey. After a stop at the ger (yur...
Read more

Mongolia Bound!

This year's anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Charlottesville passed almost without note in our house, quite a difference from the last seven years. It's not that we didn't remember, but we were, wellm distracted. I had a major deadline for a work project—the 25-page draft was due yesterday. Meanwhile, we were making lists and using up leftovers and cleaning and—PACKING! Today, we are off to Mongolia, to revel in throat singing and camel riding and starry desert nights. Mongolia was never really on our bucket list, though I have always said I'll go anywhere if I have the opportunity. Road Scholar, a nonprofit educational tour company for elders, started sending us their catalog when Joe turned 65. We always read it with interest, fantasizing about the amazing places they go. And then, late last year, the catalog announced "Special Price–Free Airfare" on a trip to Mongolia. I've never been able to pass up a great deal, and it made the trip almost affordab...
Read more

The Gobi!

Image
We've found the Gobi you see in movies! With a week of rain, much of the Gobi is in flower, green from horizon to horizon. Today, though, we came to the Seruun Bulag sand dunes—100km X 12km of soft, fine, blowing sand. Our group, minus four of us who went part way up and then watched, climbed to the top of one of the highest dunes and back down. Some Korean tourists after us hiked up with red plastic sleds, but they stayed at the top for dinner or snacks, so we didn't get to see them slide down.  While I was watching the climbers from a lower dune, a group of horses trotted out onto the sand and started rolling on their backs in evident delight. I'm sure it helps clean their fur and relieve the nuisance of flies.  We've spent a LOT of time in our vehicles the last several days. First we drove several hours, much of the time on non-road trails across rocky ground to Karakorum. We spent two nights there at the Tenger Blue Sky ger camp. The first morning, after viewing the...
Read more