JOURNEY BEFORE THE JOURNEY

This trip has been in the works for a year.  That’s right, if one of your bucket list items is to float down a river in Europe while watching castles and cathedrals and vineyards go by in 2026 you need to start looking into the different options of which cruise company/river/and time of the year might suit you best in 2025.  Believe me, there is a lot of deciding to do.

If I got into all the details I’d have to write a book.  This trip was originally supposed to be the tail end of a trip to South Africa and only the two of us.  As the year ticked by the adventure has evolved into putting South Africa on the back burner, two other couples joining us, stretching the timeline later into the spring, and swapping out my husband for my daughter.  It’s a long story but I think it will still have a happy ending.  European river cruises are way more my kind of thing than his.

The past four months have been focussed on fine tuning the details and wrapping up loose ends.  The cruise is one week long but we arrive in Amsterdam a couple days early and get to do some touring of that fair city – first with a walking tour and then an evening canal cruise so there are airport to hotel shuttles and check in times and meeting places to nail down … and added fees for all of these goodies.

And once we got all that settled we asked the travel agent to tweak it all and switch who would be traveling with me.

On the third morning we move on to our cruise ship and begin our trip which takes us from Amsterdam to Basel, Switzerland over the next week.  Being as it is spring the itinerary covers a lot of tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils.  Thankfully there are other attractions for the less ‘flower friendly’ folks in our group.  The brochures speak of how wonderful it all smells when everything is in bloom so this is a trip for one’s sense of smell too.  I’m not normally allergic to pollen but it might be a good idea to throw in some Reactin.  Too much of a good thing might be bad.

There will also be a palace, some churches, many vineyards, a market or two and lots of amazing architecture.  If my Croatian yacht cruise is any predictor of this trip it will be a lovely experience meeting our fellow travellers.  The real bonus is that this time I will also have two of my sisters and one daughter along.  Win, win, win.

It’s down to the nitty gritty now … the packing part.  For three weeks there has been a suitcase open on the guest bed and a few pieces of clothing laying across it.  Two weeks ago it was decided amongst the sisters that for our last night we get separated from our checked luggage so if we want pyjamas and a tooth brush we need to pack such things in a carry on.  I’ve decided that a small back pack is the way to go because I might want one on our walking tours anyway so one of those took its place on the bed too.  It already holds my pyjamas – the one and only thing I have formally packed so far.

With the back pack able to hole a fair amount I’m not so sure I need the bigger suitcase so now the little one has joined the jumble on the bed.  Sometime very soon I will need to sort through all the ‘maybes’ and decide what is actually going to Europe with me.

In the meanwhile somehow this last week’s calendar has filled with a bunch of appointments and commitments that can’t be ignored and I kind of promised to cook a few things to keep people alive while I’m gone.  It makes me tired just to think about it.

Oh well … I can sleep on the plane!  Right?