Dream vacation to Europe



Taj Mahal, India

We came back to Seattle in January 2011 after a refereshing 5 weeks of vacation with family in India. One more thing on our mind was to do something special for my birthday which is on June 5th. Last year for Rakesh's birthday I organized a bollywood party along with our friends who performed some wonderful bollywood songs/acting movie skits. It was a fun party. I had europe trip on my mind for my birthday. Rakesh also started thinking about whether we could plan to celebrate my birthday in Paris.

Well we got in the routine and time passed by and soon it was April. We started feeling that we were already late to make any plans. But then Rakesh's brother and sister-in-law had plans to come to Spain in June beginning for a conference. So we started to think of planning a Europe vacation together.

We started scrambling to get the Schengen visa. Well turned out you need to go in person to get Schengen visa which meant we had to fly down to SFO. That didnt seem like a feasible option as we didnt have much time in hand. We came to know about a honarary german consulate in Seattle where we could go in person to apply for Schengen visa if we made Germany as our port of entry. It seemed like a great option. So we gathered all the paperwork and met the German lady in Seattle. She approved our docs and we mailed them to SFO. Then began the wait to get the visa as we wanted to book our flight tickets soon. The prices were already rising. Luckily for us the German consulate processed the visa within 5 days and we got our visa. The peculiar thing about Schengen visa is they give you visa only for the number of days that you have on your flight itinerary. It is not a flexible visa like 6 months or a year. So you are pretty much locked on the dates for which you get the visa. So we had our visa from 19th May to 6th June.

With visa in our hands, we promptly booked our tickets and started planning our itinerary and booking the hotels, museum passes, city passes etc. The first thing that we did for our research was to buy the europe travel books by Rick Steves from Amazon.com. Rick Steves seems to be very popular among American tourists visting Europe. He gives you detailed ideas about what to see, how to plan your days, where to stay, where to eat etc. We also ordered the Rick Steves money belt as all our online research mentioned about pick pocketing in europe. Then began the search for bag packs. We wanted to travel light as recommended by Rick Steves and most of the online europe tour sites. We had lot of places to cover on our agenda so didnt want to get bogged down by luggage. We came across these bagpacks on amazon.com which had awesome reviews. We checked them out at our local REI store and fell in love. They were light, had lot of room and lot of adjustable straps which made them fit nicely. So we bought two bags - one in red for me and one in black for Rakesh. By this time our Euro Rail pass had also arrived. We spent couple of weekends shopping for clothes etc and we were all set. Finally everything was falling in place as we could not wait to board the plane to Germany.

Keep reading our blog entries as we take you with us on our Europe vacation....

Boarding the train at Rothenburg, Germany.. checkout the awesome travel pack