A vacation of a lifetime

Last October my wife and kids declared that they want to see Europe. They were going to go with or without me. All I had to do was join them. 

Then there was the scheduling issue with me going to Asia on a regular basis. So it was decided for a lot of reasons to book a two week trip in early July. As usual work always made it more difficult. I had to fly back from Asia and fly to Europe the next morning with family. This was like a recipe for disaster with Jet lag lag..

San planned everything with help from the kids. They had selected 640 places to visit in Europe in 12 days and out of respect for the laws of physics and some constraints with the time space continuum, they zeroed it down to one city per day. 

Had agreed to join them as a traveler as long as there was no driving involved and I would do the same things they did. So the deal was on. There was also one other stipulation. It was summarized in a simple Tamizh phrase "poththindu varanum".. which crudely translates to "shut all your holes and come".. or in English "Not one complaint from you on the planning"..

So I did not complain.. during the trip. There is always the post trip blog for that..

Step 1: Fly to Rome via Zurich. The flight was great. Then we ended up in the Zurich airport for a good 9 hours because... 

So we spent some quality family time together at the airport. Took some pictures.. 

Then I got to work on a yoga photo for a good 3 hours while the wife and kids did their thing. 

Here is the end result. I had posted a smaller version of this before leaving because there was no single minded focus and attention to detail then.. 

The family was just blown away by my Photoshopping dedication. Hadn't left the seat for 3 hours.. it was me and the laptop.

Oh yes.. some pictures from the airport.

We then ended up watching the world cup game where Argentina got eliminated at the gate and eventually made it to Rome. 

When we got out of the Rome airport a guy said he was the official Taxi stand guy and said 60 Euro for 4 people. We told him the hotel already told us 48 Euro. He agreed and asked us to wait at a door. We kept waiting and the first thing that hit us was the Cigarette smoke. Looks like there are more lit cigarettes at any time in Rome than there are mouths.. after some time we realized he was a quack and we found the actual taxi stand. It had a nice label. Fixed rate, 12 Euros per person per trip anywhere in city! so we stood in line, got a taxi, showed the address and reached! The driver gave us a mini tour of sorts describing places as we went from airport to hotel. 

It was actually not bad. When we finally made it to the room in Rome at almost 11PM, there was a sense of satisfaction. We had made it as a family to Europe after three earlier aborted attempts!

It could only get better from there.. 

To be continued.