The fun thing about being an overseas family with the State Department is that every so often, you come into perks. One of the better perks is vacations, in that as your home base is so far-flung, it’s much easier to go places you wouldn’t go normally.
On the other hand, when your home base is a country that doesn’t believe in vowels, you tend to steer toward normalcy on your vacations anyway.
Thus, when planning our vacation for this summer, we decided to head toward serious normalcy (and a chance for me to do some on-the-spot research) and do an abbreviated tour of Europe. Note the word “abbreviated”, because there’s a lot of ground we did not cover. My advice: get over it. We’ll go back someday and do it all properly.
Except maybe Frankfurt. I refuse to return to Frankfurt if I can at all help it.
We visited two major European cities and one pretend major city in Europe. You can visit them along with us in the order that we saw them, or in whatever order you prefer.