It's Like We Know What We Are Doing

June 13, 2013 I'd been slightly worried about today since the beginning.  Mostly, because I didn't have anything planned in advance.  But it's the train, you ask...why should I be nervous??  Do you not know me yet??  Planning is key to my sanity.  To not have a plan, it takes a lot.  Sure, a lot of the reason why things weren't completely planned on this trip was because of Candy Crush.  I WISH I was telling a lie.  But back to the trains. Yesterday, I plotted out the trip to Den Bosch.  Brussels to Roosendaal.  Roosendaal to Den Bosch.  It cost less than I'd expected.  It also gave me a few options to choose the time to go.  At breakfast this morning, Elias and I talked about it.  We decided to go to the train earlier.  We didn't have anything left to do in Brussels, so why not get to our next location sooner?? I had read that Brussels was cool, but you didn't need to plan for a massive amount of time there. ...

June 12, 2013 There was a certain point in the night where I thought Elias must have died.  No one can sleep that hard for that long.  Even with jet lag.  Lucky for me, he woke up at 3a to inhale a bottle of water.  Then, he passed out again.  I did too, so I didn't worry about him as much in my catatonic state.  We both woke up around 7a to start the day out right.   One of my prerequisites of any hotel stay is the free breakfast.  Especially in Europe.  Food always costs more than expected (even more so when factoring in the Euro/Dollar conversion), so I tend to find places where we can load up on free food (mostly carbo-loading) so we can leave for our day bellies-full.  This also helps if you want to have a bigger dinner.  You can snack your way through the afternoon hours and not feel too bad.  This was our plan for the day.  We ate all of the bacon provided and most of the crepes.  We drank more orange juice tha...

June 11, 2013 The day started...or really just continued as we never had a chance to sleep.  Luckily the Executive Decision was made before we left to set up a car to take us from the airport to the hotel.  I've been struggling with some decisions since the planning began.  "But I wouldn't hire a car if Adele was with me..."  This phrase has gone through my brain (or various phrases like this) in multiple stages of planning.  No, Adele and I would have probably used the Metro and navigated it directly to the hotel.  Which would have been easy enough.  And we would have saved some money.  But with a kid who hasn't traveled abroad before and the exhaustion I knew we'd be dealing with, I knew that phrase had to leave my brain if I was going to stay sane in the trip. We met up with our driver as we left the confines of the airport.  He was a really nice guy (the owner of the hotel,  we later learned) and mentioned bits and pieces of what we ...