Wow! What a whirlwind preparing for a year of travel and finally getting out the door. Thank you to Tobin, our handyman, who gave up his weekends (sometimes on very short notice) to make sure our home was ready for it’s new occupants, the contractors who found time to squeeze in projects for us in their busy schedules, and most importantly, our neighbors, family and friends who helped in myriad ways over the past few weeks. There is no way to adequately express our gratitude and appreciation. Getting the Brauners out the door was truly a group effort!
The first week of travel has been exhilarating, exhausting and enlightening. Just the knowledge that we were setting out for a year made even the first leg of our trip on the Bolt Bus exciting. My heart was in my throat and tears were in my eyes as we hopped on the bus after saying goodbye to a group of friends and neighbors who surprised us as we departed, and while I’m sure travel will become much more mundane as we go along, I continued to experience waves of emotion and butterflies in my stomach during the next 24 hours. Paris has such a wonderful energy, and our girls were instantly captivated by it’s beauty and bountiful treasures. For Raisa though, seeing Versailles was a “dream come true”. She’s a little obsessed with Marie Antoinette and the over-the-top opulence of Versailles is just her speed. In fact, she’ll soon be sharing her enthusiasm for Versailles with a blogpost.
Our exhaustion began before we left Eugene. In true Brauner fashion, Mark and I both stayed up all night before leaving, which was not such a bad idea considering the 9 hour time difference. Twenty-four hours of travel is guaranteed to waylay a person, but I am perpetually amazed by the fatigue induced from simply standing in line and walking in museums. Neither activities seems taxing, but after doing much of either I find myself unable to do anything other than flop in bed and take a 2 hour nap, which means dinner at 8 or 9pm. When in Rome! I’m interested to see if we will be able to build up “museum stamina” over the next year.
There have been a few lessons learned on the road. First and foremost, do not take a taxi with a young driver who starts driving away as you’re getting into the car. Yes, this happened to me. Luckily, he started off slowly and I was able to yell, “Wait!”, so a crisis was averted, but the remainder of the ride was a textbook example of almost everything that can go wrong with a taxi ride except an accident. The driver texted for the first half of the ride (until Mark made a comment about it), had a 10 minute argument over the speaker phone, drove way too close to other cars, and worst of all, played really bad (and explicit) EuroPop music the whole time. Thankfully, we arrived safely, but we have pretty much decided to profile taxi drivers for the remainder of the trip (hello middle aged boring men!) and to exit a taxi if there are any warning signs.
2nd Lesson: When relying on the subway for transportation to the airport or the train station, double check your route with the subway information attendant beforehand. We mapped out our subway ride to the Gard du Nord train station the night before using a subway map and double checking our route with an app. We even allowed twice as much time as the trip was supposed to take, but after getting on the second train, we discovered there was construction, and the line ended 3 or 4 stops before Gard du Nord. We were forced to exit the train early and walk a bit in search of a taxi since there was no way we could schlep our bags the rest of the way in the amount of time left. This was slightly stressful, and we arrived at our destination with only 6 minutes to spare, whew! Repeat note to self, double check subway route with a live person beforehand, preferably the day before.
All in all, our first week has been a success, and as I write this post, we are preparing to arrive at our next destination, Amsterdam!