Vive le Dash

My Godfather is an amazing man. I have found myself in foreign lands under strange roofs a few times in my life and it is never particularly easy. This man has gone above and beyond in the making you feel at home and supported department. So when mentioning that he had to get a car across the Netherlands to his brother, Ashley and I were eager to offer our help. A way to repay a little bit of his kindness and see the sights along the way? Perfect. Besides, the Netherlands isn't exactly a big country and Google maps said it would only be a 2 hour drive! Perhaps I should have added a little weight to my godfather's hesitation to just hand me the keys and let me jump on the road. The vehicle in question turned out to be an electric utility van, but so what? This is Europe and I had already noticed the charging stations at every gas station along the highway. Evening December 21st: We pick up the car  and, with what I assumed was an excess of caution, drove it to a nearby charging ...

 Fall break vacation! Ashley had a week off from school so we had our first European frolic. Even better, we met up with friends who were traveling too. Europe is very easy to travel by train or plane, but since we only recently arrived with Koki, we do not really have a lot of options to leave her behind. And while she’s allowed on local/regional trains, she’s not allowed on the Eurostar trains and apparently not on any trains in Spain (WTF, Spain?). So we rented a car. I will probably need to write a whole post on just driving in Europe, but I am actually getting pretty good at it (spoiler: avoid cities). The best part about a car is of course the freedom to go wherever whenever you want.  Barcelona was our first stop to meet up with Michael and Natalie. Spain is only 4 and a half hours from Nice and Barcelona only a couple hours beyond that. Since we had limited time that overlapped with them, we shot straight there and skipped over all those beautiful French cities b...