Alan and I are excitedly planning our next vacation with Angel in August– when we hope to visit Belguim, Switzerland and France (again) in a week and a half sometime in August. I’m all excited because it means going back to France, even if it is to Lyon and not Paris. Another reason I’m excited is because we’re taking Angel with us.
We plan to enplane to Brussels and then take the train to Geneva and then Lyon, from where we hope to take the flight back to New York. The choice of cities is not a random plan but is based on cities Alan had visited on business (where their hotel group has hotel properties) but which he never had a chance to enjoy because of time constraints.
We would’ve preferred to enter through Geneva, but we recently discovered that American Airlines did not fly there and Alan didn’t want to forego a stop there. Our next option was to enter through Brussels instead which was great because there’s a direct flight from New York JFK to that part of Belgium. And luckily, there are flights from Lyon via London back to JFK. We’re still tentative about our travel dates, but we’re planning on staying 3 nights in Brussels, 3 in Geneva and 2 in Lyon.
I haven’t quite gotten to planning the things we will do in the three cities because I’m still plotting the travel. Fortunately, there are sites aplenty to help me plot timetables and budgets. We plan to fly on mileage, stay in Alan’s hotels (which are all complimentary and half off food), so what would’ve been an expensive vacation is turning out to be an economical traipse through Europe.
Considering that all the transportation expenses are x3 even if Angel is only three years old, it has come as a surprise to me that given our current plans, the train fare between the three countries will cost us under $500. The bigger challenge is planning on what to bring. I still haven’t quite decided if it would be wise to lug around a portable rice cooker to make sure Angel always has his rice.
While most will opine that there will always be restaurants to order from, the type of rice I will get is subject to speculation because most other cuisines serve rice flavored with broth or some spice or other. I have already checked the bigger Chinese groceries and have found that there’s a 3-cup rice cooker available for under $30. It’s not all that bulky, but bringing a rice cooker would mean bringing the rice. With three passengers, I do have the baggage allowance (currently at 50 lbs per check in luggage, maximum 2 pieces for a total of 100 lbs per.). It wouldn’t be too much of a dilemma if we were flying to one city and staying there for the duration of the trip. The thing is I have to think of the luggage we will be lugging around doing the trains. And we already know we will be bringing a lightweight travel stroller to make it easier to take Angel around.
Then there’s the question of bringing his usual supplies or being adventurous and see what fruit juice is available in each city. Maybe we’ll do that, but the lessons of our 3-week trip to Manila still haunt me.
I mistakenly thought that diapers would be easy to come by, forgetting that he was an XL, a size not very common among the more petite toddlers in Manila. I thought Rustan’s would certainly have Cheerios in its supermarket, but I didn’t have any luck until I stumbled upon one of their smaller groceries in Magallanes. I had the wisdom to bring his favorite Gerber Vegetable crackers, but failed to bring his Gerber fruit. The long and short of it was that I vowed to bring the necessities next time. Until the next trip to Manila, I have this European sojourn to worry about.
We have been fortunate in that Angel is pretty well adjusted when it comes to traveling and eating out. We don’t have a problem bringing him to more structured dining establishments so we aren’t confined to the so-called “family dining” restaurants. After surviving the New York-Manila-New York trip, the Europe sojourn should be a breeze. (More so since he is now totally weaned from breast-feeding unlike the 2006 trip to Manila.)
This is just one of the many vacations we hope to take with Angel as he grows. It’s not just about making memories with our little boy, but more importantly,part of our desire to expose him to the world to hopefully help him form a better appreciation if the uniqueness and diversity of the different cultures that make up his bigger world. Alan and I believe that we ought to start him young so that he would be able to see the world before his prejudices set in. It’s an ambitious plan but we want to try.
We don’t want him growing up with wrong notions about the world outside his home country. We want him to take pride in his heritage as a Filipino-American by making sure he gets to know his parents’ birthplace firsthand as he grows up. We want him to see how great other people across th seas are, and that there is so much to aspire for. While you can say we can teach him all that here in the US, those of you who have travelled will agree that seeing the world enriches one like no other experience can.
Brussels, Geneva, Lyon — here we come!
