As most of my regular readers know we’ve typically done the "big" vacation in the fall (usually in September or October) and much of the preceding year is spent in the planning stages. In fact, when you think about it there really isn’t a month throughout the entire year where we aren’t either travelling, planning on travelling or preparing slide show from a place that we’ve recently travelled to.

So anyway, we had decided that we wanted to do another short trip to Paris and we had already started on working on the details such as looking for flight deals when the discussion between Barb and I started to evolve to include going to some other parts of France while we were going to Paris. A side trip to the Bordeaux region started to sound really interesting and we never thought that a trip to the south of France down by the Mediterranean was in the cards. It was all sounding really fun but as it turned out the most unassuming travel article that I happened to read seemed to have us completely reassess the whole trip.

The article was about how Berlin was one of the great travel bargains of any major European city.

I clearly remember the conversation that I had with Barb around this time. It was basically that the trip to France was going to be really expensive for what was supposed to be our "short" vacation and that a getaway to (just) Berlin was perhaps a great idea. Especially with it being so cheap and all.

Barb and I hadn’t been to Berlin together since we went to Germany in December of 2001 so there was the whole it would be nice to go back to Berlin together after so many years thing that appealed to us and of course we would be saving all that money from not going to France. After all of this sunk in for a few days, we started to think that maybe while were were in Germany that we should take a few extra days to explore a few other parts of the country. A few more days went by, a few more things got added to the itinerary. You have to understand that all of these major changes to our trip really took place over no more than about a one week period. By the time the dust settled, we had expanded our time in Germany to a full three weeks which will include car rentals, train rides and flights within Germany. Oh, before I forget, there was one other small addition got added to the list: we’re going to Germany with my mother in law. More on that later.

As of today we’ve booked our Air Canada flights to Frankfurt and have a number of other small outstanding details still to plan out over the next few weeks. There always seems to be a number of things to take care of no matter how many times you travel.

For the record, we never really did end up doing any research on how cheap Berlin is. I guess we’ll find out when we get there.

Baden