What, plan a vacation?


You meet the most interesting characters in the English countryside.

For our previous overseas vacation in England in '95, we'd done comparatively little planning - we made hotel reservations in London, booked a rental car in Bristol, packed a couple of travel books, and went. The only thing Eva had in mind then was London shows. I, on the other hand, knew exactly what I wanted to do: the motor museum in Beaulieu, the SS Great Britain and as many other Brunel artifacts as I could lay eyes on, the Windermere Steamboat Museum. In the end, everything had worked out very well.

So this time we decided to plan pretty much our entire route and every night's stay in advance. I think we were concerned over our lack of French and limited German language skills getting in the way of our being able to find places to stay and so forth, in retrospect that reason seems a little silly.

A few parameters were already established. We had two weeks plus the weekend at each end. We were flying into Frankfurt because that's about as close to Munich as our American Airlines frequent-flyer miles could conveniently get us. The car had to be picked up in Munich, and dropped off at an E.H. Harms office in one of ten or so cities.

A few more sights from 1995.
The SS Great Britain in its original graving dock, Bristol.
Fourth wedding anniversary toasted aboard a turn-of-the-century lake steamer chartered out of the Windermere Steamboat Museum. I love this place.
What we drove when we were driving. It got down the motorways at 80MPH, but it's certainly no 540i.
We spent many, many evenings deciding where to go and how to get there. Eva knew she wanted to spend a few days in Paris, but at first didn't have much else in mind. I wanted to get to the Verdun battlefields, somehow get out on the old Nürburgring, and wasn't much interested in driving in Paris. We collected the customary wad of maps and travel books from, among other places, Phileas Fogg's Travel. For France and Switzerland we had the Lonely Planet and Rick Steves books, while for Germany it was the Rough Guide and Michelin books.

After a couple weeks and a few mild arguments, the trip shaped up as:

Fly into Frankfurt.
Get to Munich, presumably by ICE.
Drive west or southwest either through Switzerland or the Black Forest area and worm our way over to Chamonix.
Work our way up through eastern France to Verdun.
Zip northeast across Luxembourg to Cologne, stopping at the 'Ring on the way.
Drop the car at the Harms office in Cologne, and catch the Thalys to Paris, where we'd lump our goods from the Gare du Nord over to a hotel in the 7th Arrondissement for a few nights.

Some time was then spent cross-checking the paper resources with 'Net resources, starting to figure out where we wanted to stay, researching German and French traffic laws, and otherwise dotting i's and crossing t's. This all eventually translated into the following stops:

Frankfurt - one night
Munich - two nights
Mittenwald - one night
Interlaken - two nights
Talloires - two nights
Bouilland - one night
Verdun - one night
Cologne - two nights
Paris - two nights

We were able to get our hotel reservations in Frankfurt, Munich, and Talloires settled via email. Most others were handled via fax. With Mittenwald the first institution I faxed responded that they were full. So did the second. Feeling desperate, I finally sat down at 1AM with the Michelin book and proceeded to call hotels until I found one that had room. In the end we decided to wing it around Verdun (what really happened, of course, was that I got tired of the whole planning process and gave up.)

Time to pack and get ready...