Kids are a game change. Mine are young and we didn’t travel as much in the last years due to pregnancies and covid travel restrictions. I still have to re-learn or adapt on how to plan vacations.
A small one doesn’t necessarily need a plane ticket and can sleep in your room or bed. But later on, and with more than one? 4 or 5 seats main season hit differently than 2 tickets off-season. They may not take the flight well (neither a long train or car ride), and I don’t handle long flights or different times zones as smoothly as I used to, either. And you do need that family room or whole apartment / house.
While still young, they likely won’t appreciate a different culture, historical places or nature, and neither can you fully as you have to watch them all the time. It becomes more important whether there’s a nice playground or children pool, for which you really don’t have to travel around the world.
Luckily, we did cover some traveling and lived abroad before having them, so it doesn’t feel like we’re missing out. Not saying it’s bad now, it’s just different and probably keeps on changing as they get older.
This sounds fantastic. Where’s that? Is it a big castle with lots of towers? Is it over-crowded?
Read a statistic a while ago that they top the list for vacations abroad, either in number of people and / or money spend.
Sounds plausible, given the size of the population and economy, and assuming other countries might have less holidays and more options, e.g. for beach holidays in the same country.
Makes sense that touristic regions adapt to them, I can benefit as German speaker
Ours was a hotel in Attica, a convenient stop between arriving in Rafina Port and going to Athens Airport.
I guess the free alcohol brought out loud and rowdy behavior in people. I like to move around, skip lunch, sample local delicacies and have inexpensive drinks at local cafes/bars. That’s why being tied to a single place does not work for me.
Hmmm, I think I was there once on a company meeting, it was alright. Overall I find hotels a very hit and miss experience, I feel it makes sense to either go as cheap as possible and use the money not spent in enjoying a place OR go expensive where people wipe your butt for you, and nothing in the middle. Edit to qualify what I mean: when we were young(er) and didn’t have kids our strategy would be to find a really cheap place right at the dead centre of wherever we were going, literally just having a decent bed and a shower/toilet would do (sometimes it really was that) and we’d only use it for sleeping, showering and…other couple activities, so we wouldn’t really spend any substantial time there. Getting older and with kids that obviously doesn’t work so going the other way of the all-inclussive where one can relax. I still can’t ever do more than 4-5 days, though, gets too boring for me.
As an Athenian I love Athens more than any other place (except maybe Cambridge and Edinburgh…), but can also understand it’s a chaotic, dirty, ugly city, not well set up for tourists, and possibly tourists wouldn’t even get why I love it. This place is a bit out of the way indeed, far from the centre and not on any spectacular sea either - generally as a local I’d say the Attica sea is to be avoided.
It’s good, the food was incredible (had several different themed restaurants), the water park, pools and beach were great. Also had cinemas, nightclub, watersports, gym. It was expensive but worth it.
That’s painfully true, and something we’ve discussed with my wife too. We’ve been with our kids to many very nice places around the BL, FR, DE region but they simply don’t get to take it in, we’d see a very beautiful village/town like Colmar, Eguisheim and the like, or city like Strasbourg, Freiburg, Paris even and they’d be bored, tired and interested in tourist crap, or the locals’ playground. Doesn’t matter, we tell ourselves that some of it stays with them and they’ll remember that their parents took them to places. My own certainly did and I remember both feeling miserable being dragged through many of Europe’s great museums, and now appreciating it as an adult with kids!
There are daily flights to Athens from ZRH and about 3-5 per week from BSL (Easyjet). The problem is that you can’t realistically get there from Athens without a car
Actually it is in Tallinn. Not many towers and visiting is difficult, because there are governmental offices.
And there is no subway, but trams and to some extent regional trains that are used as a rapid transit system. The prices must be cheap, and the language is easy to understand (if you speak Finnish).
Right now looking mostly at spots a reasonable drive, where there might be a bit of water, some easy hikes, and some playgrounds.
For the toddler I’m also looking at some short hikes in CH with the giant “wooden marble runs” to keep them interested in walking .
And potentially some hikes even if we have to solo them (when 1 parent stays and plays with the kids).
It was fine with 1 kid, but 2 or more is much harder to plan for… will be purchasing a 6 person dome tent soon and testing some (car) camping as well.
Also we will likely still send them to Kita 2 days each week to get a “real break” while one of us does an overnight hike somewhere and the other does a day hike those 2 days.
So we will do 3.5 weeks x 4 mini vacations [5days with the kids + 2 days off (at Kita!)]…instead of 1 giant one where we are exhausted by the end of it.
My kids are 6 and 4. When they were small, I used to carry them on hikes. But now they can walk well so no problem doing an overnight hike with them. The only issue is since they walk on average about half adult speed or slower, you have to adjust for that.
Yikes – according to the article they only do the competition if there is at least 50 km/h of wind and on standard bikes with no gears … now I feel I only participated in the kids’ edition of that race (although I did bike about 40 km on that day instead of just the 8.5 km in the Tegenwindfietsen competition).
Speaking of fietsen … I love that word as a native German speaker. It’s so close to the German flitzen which is really what bicycling mostly feels like (unless there’s that heavy headwind).
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