Travels With The Baron
Kim and Larry
Travels With The Baron
So here's the deal. Although we travel around the US several times a year by car and air for vacation as well as business, we’re certainly not the frequent, sophisticated “Up In The Air” kind of travelers. We’re probably awfully….normal. We do plan our trips and budget carefully, but we always have the time of our lives. We believe that even an overnight getaway can recharge your batteries and spirits just as effectively as a luxury trip to the Mediterranean. Or that’s the illusion we will live with, anyway. There’s a middle ground between the Paris Ritz-Carlton and a youth hostel where you take your own sheets. That’s us.
In March, 2004 we had an opportunity to fly to London for 5 days with my parents. We were given the air tickets from my folks as a Christmas present---$200 roundtrip to London on British Airways. Probably will never see airfares like that again! For our hotel rooms and train tickets, we used a fantastic travel agent (shout out to Toni Gregg at Spears Travel). Toni booked us all into a wonderful hotel, the Thistle Hyde Park, which was everything you’d want a British hotel to be: charming, quiet, safe, convenient, and reasonably priced. This was our first international travel experience and it was marvelous. Of course we learned a lot (how not to pack, the need to outline activities and sights to see, watching the budget, coping with jet lag) but the trip was a massive success. More about London, as well as our stateside adventures, as we go.
Flash forward to spring, 2010. Our middle son is currently stationed at Kaiserslautern, Germany. This is his 2nd tour in Europe and we didn’t go the first time he was there. So we threw caution to the winds and booked a trip for Dec 2010, as this was the best time of yr for us to take time off work. Not being terribly sophisticated travelers and not wanting to spend hours online finding the cheapest airfares, we again called Toni for our plane tickets. Fortunately, we didn’t have hotel costs since we were staying with our son. We had the best (free!) tour guides in the world—our son and his lovely wife. So this is the Tale of our Teutonic Travels. Hopefully this will be a fun blog to read and hopefully we’ll have more trips in the future (both foreign and domestic).