The Big Trip: Eastern Europe

So we took of from LAX, and landed eventually, by way of Oslo, in Budapest, Hungary. This was our first stop on our month long tour of Eastern Europe:

We spent about eight days in Budapest, and the rest of the 24 days winding our way through the former Yugoslavia, which has now broken into six different countries, of which we visited four: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. (The others are Serbia and Macedonia). We also had one day in Trieste, Italy. It was an exceptionally good trip! There was a great balance of beautiful places, big cities, old quaint cobble stoned villages, mountains, new cultures, swimming, good and interesting food, and an incredibly enlightening and sobering overview of twentieth century history.

And yes, we did the trip with our whole family, including our four boys ages 12, 10, 8, and 4. I think, for the most part, everyone enjoyed it. Ben, who is four, did a great job in general of just going with the flow, made possible by Nephi carrying him on his shoulders a lot. There is no way he could have done all the walking that we did on his own. It was, some days, a bit too much walking for Isaac, too. Poor Isaac seemed to be allergic to Europe. His eyes were puffy and his nose ran almost the whole trip, which was sad, and he felt tired a lot either from feeling allergic or from the allergy medication. But I think he was still able to enjoy a lot of the experience. Joseph and Caleb were troopers and I think were really influenced by many of the things we saw, especially related to recent history. Nephi and I worked hard the whole time, figuring things out and planning and keeping the troops fed and rested. For the most part, I planned the itinerary and booked our apartments and figured out transportation options, and Nephi navigated us where we needed to go each day. We've got a system down and make a good travel pair. We also got to have Nephi's sister ellen travel with us for about two weeks, and there were many times when having another adult along was an enormous help.

If you have kids and are wondering if you can travel with them, I say yes! You can do it! It will cost you more money, and you won't be able to efficiently do anything, and I think you need to be willing to do more planning and have less spontaneity, but of course you can. I love that my kids have experienced different cultures and navigated public transportation systems and tried different foods and seen different money and heard different languages and swam in the Adriatic Sea and been to a synagogue in Budapest and heard a call to prayer in Sarajevo and seen scars of war and played tag and soccer with people from other countries. I love it.  It is so important to me that my boys understand how big and beautiful and old and amazing, and sometimes dark, the world and humanity is. It is worth the time and effort and money to me.

Travelling with kids also influenced where we traveled because there were a lot of us and only a finite amount of money. All the places we visited ranged between roughly equal in cost of living/travelling to the US to considerably cheaper. Some places we could go eat at a decent restaurant for $35 for us all and rent an apartment for $65 a night, which was really great. We considered, for example, Scandinavia, but it would have been so much more expensive (the most expensive meal of our entire trip was a lunch we ate in Oslo on a layover on the trip home). We were looking for both interesting and reasonably affordable. Another top candidate for this was Poland. Maybe another time!

I'm going to barrage this blog with posts and pictures of each of the cities and areas we visited and just wanted to start out with this overview. It was an amazing trip, and we were incredibly fortunate to be able to experience it!