2025 Europe Trip Outtakes

So I try to instill this, especially, in my children...life is not all Instagram perfect.  So I thought I would wrap this trip up with some of the bumps in the road during this trip...or outtakes.

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  I took a really hard fall in the streets of Brussels walking from the train station to our hotel.  Luckily I had on a skirt, so I did not rip or bloody any clothes, but I had massive road rash on both knees.  And my left knee is still scabbed over all these days later and for the first time in my life I took ibuprofen for pain for a few days.
• Do not put your Underground/Metro ticket with your cell phone as Alec learned.  First time an agent helped him through the exit.  The second time we just pushed him through the turnstile with Andy.
• All Underground/Metro ticket systems are not created equal.  We had a good laugh that every time we tried to buy 3 one-way tickets in Brussels the path to purchasing those tickets on the kiosks was different each time.  Sometimes we could purchase 3 in one transaction other times we had to purchase them each through a separate transaction.
• Picking up our rental car in Brussels turned into an adventure as it was all set to German and it would take us a good hour and figure out how to change it to English.  In the meanwhile we muddled through and used my phone to decipher the onboard navigation and eventually get it all changed over.
• Night one camping at InTentsGP for the Belgium Formula 1 race we had a couple of drunk Brits try to enter our tent after the pub/bar closed.  Scared us, but ultimately, we all had a good laugh.  In their defense all the tents look the same minus a little number tag at the entry...and probably even more so drunk and in the dark.  We even came back blurry eyed from breakfast one morning and sat down outside one tent and started to eat and finally realized we were a row off.
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  Formula 1 Grand Prix morning was a downpour.  We literally walked 45 minutes in the rain to the track.  We did have rain gear, but our shoes were soaked and would remain so until the end of the trip.  "It smells a bit like feet in there" - Alec's line after attempting to dry his shoes with the hair dryer in Cologne hotel bathroom.
• "Do you have any toilet roll (aka toilet paper)? became the common line in the port-a-restrooms at our campgrounds for the Belgium F1 race.  I may or may not have dripped dry a few times.
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  Chips (Fries), Beer, and Water is the breakfast of champions when the catering tent is too full due to the downpour for us to even get to the cereal the morning of the F1 Grand Prix.
• Thank goodness my husband is an engineer...I am not sure I would have remembered that bars is another way to measure air pressure/PSI and jumped on Google to do a conversion to air up our tires properly in Germany.
• While driving in Germany it took us many exits to figure out Ausfahrt means exit and wasn't a very large city with a lot of exits.
• Returning our car in Cologne was a 20 minute adventure...first as we sat at a garage entry point with a gate we could not figure out how to open and then we looked left after several minutes to see an open entry right next us. Then we totally missed the small Hertz key drop box and wondered around a bit before finding it and dropping our keys without the proper paperwork and crossed our fingers it would go well.  It did.
• Andy had to block people on numerous flights who tried to push their way past us and others to be the first off the plane. Always keep in mind different cultures handle personal space differently.
• A lot of doors push inward in stores versus pulling out.  Once I stood trying trying to decipher a store sign in German as I thought it was closed to find yes, the door opened inward and it was just operator error.  I am sure the sales team inside was having a good laugh.
• But on the other hand motion sensored self-opening doors were also a lot of fun and caught us off
  guard and became an inside joke as we are in the midst of watching Andor and proved to be a little jedi power humor.
• I will never see these people again and my love of hats proves helpful....when we realize I should not have brought my US travel hair dryer or straight iron.  We eventually bought a small hair dryer before leaving London and a UK to EU converter for it to find no easy place to use it camping AND IT RAINED A LOT, and then we had hair dryers in our hotel rooms the rest of the trip.  You are welcome to whoever finds the unused hair dryer and my Lonely Planet Germany book in our hotel desk in Berlin.
• After years with a retainer Alec nearly lost it three times on this trip.  Two times in the morning when he wasn't quite awake.  Both times we were able to retrieve it from the "rubish"/trash.  The third took a phone flash light and scouring the plane floor.
• Leaving SFO late on a Friday night is still a challenge....from it taking an hour+ to get our luggage to it taking nearly an hour to go a couple of miles to get over the Bay Bridge at 11PM thanks to normal traffic as well as the Grateful Dead's 60th show that had just wrapped in Golden Gate Park. 

All of these unexpected bumps make us better travelers.  They make us more patient travelers and people, children, parents, spouses. It makes you ask others for help and/or to slow down. Along with all of these there were lots of pleasurable bumps from an impromptu dance party in Brussels to watching England's women football (soccer) team win the Europe Cup with a bunch of Brits in a pub.  None of it we would trade.  We have always been a family who prefers to spend our money on experiences versus things.  And not all of those experiences quite pan out the way you envisioned, but they all create memories that will last a life time.