1 Family Vacation + 4 Diaries Adds to the Fun

The family that vacations together may sleep in the same hotel, eat the same food, travel in the same small car, tour the same museums and keep the same hours. But don’t kid yourself that they visit the same places.

We tested that hypothesis during a 17-day trip last August to Germany, France and the Netherlands with our own family. The group included two 4O-ish parents (Ruth, who’s the medical writer for the Houston Chronicle, and Paul, the newspaper’s computer systems editor); Danielle, the 14-year-old daughter, better known as Dandy, and Richard, the 9-year-old son.

Each person kept a secret diary, and the code was not cracked until we returned. But even before the day we shared the diaries, it was obvious that we saw things from different perspectives.

Here’s our retrospective account of the trip, with daily excerpts from each family member’s diary:

The secret to a relaxing flight across the Atlantic is to sit separately from your children. Ruth: I had that sinking feeling that maybe taking a 14-year-old and a 9-year-old to Europe and spending two weeks with them in a hotel room was asking a lot of parents who just wanted to relax after a tiring summer.

But on the plane, luckily, Paul and I ended up sitting in two seats together, three rows ahead of them. Within an hour, all the window shades on the airplane had been closed and we had entered that Twilight Zone of long plane trips, after which the reward would be getting off the plane somewhere else, in this case Amsterdam.

Paul: It will be our first trip departing from Houston’s new Mickey Leland International Terminal. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we were not going to be charged for headsets or drinks on the flight, even though we were in tourist class.

Dandy: This will be a plane trip that I will talk about for a long time! First thing that led me to this decision was when Richie, my little brother, took off his socks and shoes. Somehow, amazingly enough, his sock ended up halfway across the plane. Next thing I knew, a little girl came up grimacing with Richie’s dirty sock. All in all, the flight wasn’t too bad because the food was great and we did get to Europe alive.

Richie: When we were trying to go to sleep, the kid in the seat in front of us popped up and started yelling and laughing. Then Dandy told me to sleep on the floor, but I didn’t. And she complained that I was kicking her.

Ruth flies ahead to a medical meeting she is covering in Hamburg, leaving Paul to trek across the northern part of the Netherlands and Germany with two sleepy children. Richie: Not much happened today. We landed in Amsterdam at 6:25 a.m. Then we rented a car and drove to Hamburg.

Dandy: We stopped at a restaurant and we ate a really big hot dog with French fries. It was yummy. When we were waiting for our check, I accidentally scratched Richie’s arm and he acted like I had killed him. He was raising his arm, pretending he was dying and fell out of his seat backward. My Dad and I laughed so hard.

When you take a tour, be sure you speak the language. Paul: After about 12 hours of sleep, we woke up and took the kids to their first European breakfast at the InterContinental Hotel in Hamburg. Richie was faced with about a dozen different types of cereal heavy in rolled grains, but was very pleased to find Rice Crispies and Cocoa Crispies among the selection. Danielle was impressed with the platters of cheese and croissants, as well as scrambled eggs and bacon.

Ruth: They say you should take a boat tour of the Hamburg harbor, and they’re right. But I saw Richie’s face crumple into frustration when he realized that all the description would be in German.

Dandy: The only problem with the harbor cruise was that the guide only spoke German. If I actually listened to the tour guide, then I understood most of what he said.

Richie: We went sightseeing. It was awesome.

Don’t feel too bad when a child’s grumpy. Most of the time, the grumbling is only on the outside. Ruth: Richie collapsed at the hotel from jet lag, disorientation and the fact that I blew up when he pushed the red button on my telephone, disconnecting me in mid-call from the office. Also, there wasn’t anyone on horseback in Lubeck, the medieval town to which Paul, Dandy and Richie drove while I worked at the hotel.

“I just want to go home,” he said. “I don’t like Europe.” We compromised and ate at McDonald’s tonight.

Paul: Lubeck was beautiful. We strolled around the walled city. Danielle was most impressed with the church of St. Jakobi-Kirche, which dates to the 1600s. Richie, who was suffering some homesickness, was not impressed with Lubeck. When we told him it was a medieval city, he thought there would be knights on horses.

Dandy: Lubeck was a walled city, and the town was so pretty. It was like going though a time warp to a little village where everything was so perfect and people knew other people.

Richie: Today, I went to Lubeck. Lubeck is a small town outside of Hamburg. It was actually pretty neat. The city hall looked like a castle. Old-town Lubeck had a giant wall around it. So if you’re ever in Germany, you should stop there.

No one sightsees well before the crack of dawn. Paul: We were up before 6 this morning so we could go to the St. Pauli Fischmarkt, an early morning custom on Sundays in Hamburg. The closest parking place was about eight blocks away and the market was so crowded I was afraid I was going to lose Richie.

Dandy: Never wake up at 6 a.m., skip breakfast and go to the fish market. The fish market was just too darned crowded.

Richie: Today I was awoken to see a very early morning sun. Then I had to get dressed real fast because we were going to the fish market, which didn’t just sell fish. It also sold little things that you really don’t need.

You can get there from here, but your feet will hurt. Paul: We decided to go to Berlin, about a three-hour drive. When we got to the East German border, it was a shock to find the massive border installations of both East and West unmanned. The Eastern facility was larger than any toll plaza I had seen in the United States. Eliminating the border guards obviously put a lot of Germans out of work.

Richie: Today, we went to Berlin, a city divided by the Berlin Wall. But first we went to the zoo, which has lots of animals you can’t see in Houston, like mongeese, wallabies and one giant panda.

Next we went to the Berlin Wall. Dad thought the wall was in walking distance from the zoo, but we soon found out it wasn’t.

Dandy: It was hard to believe that less than a year ago the Berlin Wall was heavily guarded and on one side people were totally free and on the other side people were under a Communist government. It’s hard to believe that the now-crumbling wall separated families. As far as you could see down the wall, there were people pounding with sledgehammers and other metal objects. It was almost like the wall had to come down for everyone.

A picture is worth a thousand exhibits. Dandy: Today we went to an art museum. They had a wonderful collection. We saw two Manets, one Monet, three Renoirs, one Pissarro and one Rodin. All of these wonderful works of art were in one room.

Richie: After the art museum, we went outside to eat lunch. After we walked part way back to the hotel, I threw up because I had eaten a poor-boy and some very, very rich chocolate ice cream.

Ruth: Feeding four hungry people at restaurants in Europe is getting pretty expensive.

Paul: Armed with a European atlas and our itinerary, we took off across Germany toward France. The trip through France was easy until we reached Paris and found that a section of the loop was closed, messing up our great plans. We finally decided the easiest way to find our hotel was to take the loop in the other direction and drive around the city. The plan worked and we found our hotel, thanks to much map-checking by Ruth.

Ruth: As usual, Paul drove and drove and drove. When he could go no more, he asked me to try. The Autobahn drivers terrified me. Everyone drives over 70 m.p.h. and many over 100 m.p.h. I averaged around 80.

But the French desk clerk was nice. He found us a free place to park and a place to eat that welcomed two bleary-eyed adults and two children with a reasonably priced menu.

If you want to stay in Paris, you’ve got to learn to push.

Paul: We got going early today to meet our daylong tour of Paris. I had the duty of finding our way on the Metro, since we determined that we didn’t want to do any more driving in Paris. Ruth: We toured Paris on a bus today. I decided I wanted to go with someone else who would tell the children where they ought to go next. The Greek sculptures were, as usual, coldly beautiful, but Dandy didn’t like them. Why, she asked, did the Greeks always leave the heads off?

Richie: Today, we went on a tour of Paris, which was actually very fun. First, we rode in the bus a little bit, and the first famous sight we saw was Notre Dame. The Louvre is where they hold some very famous paintings, such as the “Mona Lisa,” the most famous painting in the world. It was awesome. We went to the chapel of the Invalides, where they hold the body and crypt of Napoleon and one of his brothers.

Dandy: Food in Paris is quite expensive! I had my first taste of real French pate. It tasted good, but the pate felt weird in my mouth! We started our second tour with a boat trip. The guide on the boat spoke five or six different languages. All over the shores of the Seine, there were people sunning naked. It was a pretty funny sight.

It’s a long way from Paris to Amsterdam. Richie: Today we went back to the Eiffel Tower. But we had to wake up real early because we had to go to Amsterdam by car after we saw the tower.

Paul: The Parc Champ de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower sparkled from an early morning watering and made a wonderful place to sit on a park bench and drink coffee and eat our morning croissants. We then piled into our car, got lost once and finally found our way out of Paris toward Lille. The Belgian jinx then started.

Dandy: The drive was hard. Mom and Dad had lots of problems finding the right roads. We couldn’t hardly talk to them because they got mad. They first tried to go to Antwerp; then they tried to go to Brussels because they had lost the way to Antwerp. Then they lost their way to Brussels. We finally got to the hotel in Amsterdam and sent our parents out for dinner. Ruth: I love Amsterdam. Outside our hotel, with two big double beds, there was a big party going on with all the late-summer revelers lounging in the square while mimes, unicyclists and magicians, along with pickpockets (I’m sure), plied their entertaining trades.

Ruth: The sun shone bright on a Dutch morning, coming in through the sheer drapes in golden streaks that lightly stroked the covers on our bed and woke us later than we had planned.

We walked toward the Anne Frank museum with the city bustling around us. There was a short line outside the Anne Frank House, with a few people waiting to be allowed inside and several more waiting for the museum “boot” (boat) to make its appointed round. When you enter the house, you are confronted by steep Dutch stairs, and you begin to understand the isolation as you mount that tall slope.

Then we entered the hiding place--tiny rough rooms with too much furniture and too little light once the skinny little windows were covered over, as they must have been during the two years that the families hid there.

There was an incredible feeling of sadness, of a forlorn little girl who would never grow up, have children or know her own potential.

Dandy: We first went to the Anne Frank House, and we actually got to go up to where she spent many years hiding. I think it was really awful that anyone would have to hide like that. Richie: I was sad.

Whether your bicycle’s for one, two or four, stay away from the canal. Ruth: We took a grand bike tour today, complete with young enthusiastic travelers to delight Dandy and Richie and an expatriate American guide who appeared to take most things in stride. That was a good thing.

The true adventure began when we tried to pass a small carnival parked on the road in a tiny Amsterdam suburb. Paul and the other men decided to ride the tiny concrete ribbon next to the canal. The women decide to walk their bikes. As we were walking along, we heard a splash. I looked up to see Paul pushing his bike out of the canal ahead of him. All I could think is that our traveler’s checks and money and lunch went in with him.

Paul: I had the ultimate Dutch experience on our bike trip. While dismounting I caught my foot on the lunch bag attached to my bike, lost my balance and went--bike and all--into the canal. I got soaking wet, lost my glasses and provided the day’s entertainment.

Dandy: We heard a splash. We looked up and saw that one of the bikers had fallen into the water. We go up closer and saw that it was my Dad. My mom was trying to go to him, and this dog was growling at her. So she said to it, “Behave yourself.” And it did.

Richie: Today we went on a bike tour and we saw a windmill and how it works, went shopping in a village outside of Amsterdam. We also saw a cheese farm.