Tom and Linda’s 2008 Europe Trip

From Linda:

From 12 August through 24 September we toured Europe. Tom had never been on The Continent before, and I had only been to Greece. We had each seen some parts of the UK, and would start our trip there.

This was a long trip because of two events Tom really wanted to attend. His son, Kevin Noe, had taken his Theater of Music (Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble) to perform at The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and we would catch the last few days of that. At the other end was a motorcycle tour in the Alps, something Tom had wanted to do all his life.

The scheduling of these two events left 4-5 weeks in the middle that we had to fill up somehow! It was amazing, and this is where we went. Notes are taken mostly from my journal and my memory. Photos are mostly Tom’s.

From Tom:

For the most part we traveled with the guidance of Rick Steves and his Europe Through the Back Door and Best of Europe books. On his advice we packed just a small backpack each and shipped our riding gear to the hotel near Munich where the bike tour would start. This photo shows the sum total of our travel luggage, including my daypack and Tom's camera.

Packing light worked out very well, and we’ll never travel the other way again! If you’re interested, Rick’s website has all the details for how to do this.

We traveled mostly by train on a Eurail pass for two. It's a little expensive, but less than individual tickets or car rental. And it allowed us tremendous flexibility, which we used to great advantage, as you will see.

But in the UK we rented a car. Train travel there is inexplicably expensive, and the car gave us a different kind of freedom.

The links below divide the trip into smaller parts. Six weeks is a long time, and there are a lot of photos, even after considerable culling. In some cases, I've added a link wthin the narrative to pages with more photos, if you're interested in seeing more of an area. London to Edinburgh first. Enjoy!

Index