Caravan Halen 2.0

[There's a new page for this holiday blog, which also has pictures - https://caravanhalen.wixsite.com/caravanhalen2]

Prologue

• It’s been six years since the first edition of Caravan Halen, which was a travel and photo diary of sorts for an epic trip around the USA in a Ford F-150 and a caravan.  That was a real once-in-a-lifetime trip.  But there’s a problem with once-in-a-lifetime trips.  They’re so much fun that when you return, the idea that you’ve peaked as far as holidays go is a bit hard to stomach.  So pretty quickly you decide that that sort of a trip needs a rebrand to twice- or thrice-in-a-lifetime, and start trying to figure out how to swing the next one (beginning with paying off the last one as fast as possible)  

• The planning is almost as good as the actual holiday, and planning a good big one necessarily takes a long time, with all the saving and the logistical figuring out and the real life.  I’ve had a spreadsheet going for most of the last six years, with many many different ideas and itineraries for the next big trip.  With Covid, and kids growing up, and new jobs, and various other flavours of real life, the plan stayed fairly amorphous

• Over time the holiday savings fund started to look a little healthier, it felt like the kids were getting to a good age, and the many itineraries were narrowing down to one:  a road trip around Europe.  But there were always extremely good reasons not to do it.  Money!  Jobs! School!   What we needed was something to make us pull the trigger

• Moderately ridiculously, that thing was the Oasis reunion. I’ve always been a fan, but certainly not enough to fly to the other side of the world just to see them. But if we could get tickets, well, that might just be the thing to tip the scales on the trip we’d been daydreaming about. So when they went on sale, and we ended up at the front of the queue despite many millions of other fans scrambling to get seats, we were suddenly one step closer

• Now the planning became real.  A very ambitious six months got very quickly scaled back to four, then three, then two.  We toyed with trains, checked out campervans and caravans, and figured that a rental car was the right option.  Work and school conversations were had, house-and-dog-sitters locked in.  Deep breaths taken, tickets booked.  We were going!

• A potted summary of the trip: nine weeks all up.  Three nights in New York as a stopover.  A week in the UK, split between London, and family visits up north.  Then the train to Brussels and a rental car, and a seven week journey through Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Germany again, Switzerland, and France.  Home from Paris, via Singapore.  Yikes!

• When we were on the America trip, I really enjoyed writing about it, and over the last few years have really enjoyed going back and re-reading the blog and remembering the trip.  Like any muscle, the writing one atrophies pretty quickly and I’ve really struggled to get going with writing on this trip.  Partly I’m just even more out of practice – it feels like going for a run for the first time in ages, all aching joints and uncoordinated clunky sentences.  The routine is a little different too: in the caravan, kids aged 4 and 1 were often asleep by 8 or 9 leaving a couple of hours for writing and reading.  Now the kids are getting older, they’re staying up later, especially on holiday hours, so that magical window is pretty small.  Two weeks in, I’ve read half a chapter of Stephen King and I’m still on the prologue of the blog  – also partly because any time it get a spare few minutes it's always easier to find some fresh politics or football news to read on my cursed phone 

• While it would be much easier to just check the football transfer gossip one more time, and go to sleep at the same time as the kids, I really want to persevere.  Partly stubbornness – I remember the lovely feeling of when writing came easily, and I’d like to think I can get there again, even if it feels painfully clumsy for now.  But mainly because I want to be able to read over it in a few years time and enjoy reminiscing about this trip, just as I have with the USA caravan odyssey – a gift for Future Me

• For anyone reading this who isn’t Future Me, here are a few pointers:

  • As per Caravan Halen season one, because the internet is a strange place, we’ll use pseudonyms.  As your humble narrator I get to be “I”, and the others are Bo, Mo, and Kitty

  • The writing style will be a chronological bullet point jumble – it seemed to work last time

  • Sadly there won't be pictures to accompany the musings - Wix have updated their model since Caravan Halen 1.0 and the photos from 1.0 mean I can't add any more without paying an exorbitant monthly fee. If all this text is a bit overwhelming, you can see some pix from the trip here: https://www.instagram.com/caravan_halen/

• I’m already over two weeks late, but will try and post every week or so, or every couple of countries 

  
  

  NYC

• Part of the planning game was figuring out where to stop over.  It definitely needed to be somewhere – flying all the way in one go with kids felt like a dreadful idea.  While we love the States, the main reason for picking NYC was the flight times – get the longest leg done first, and the combo of leaving NZ and arriving in the US in the evening felt like the least worst way of doing things

• It’s a 16 hour flight and a 16 hour time difference.  You leave at 7.30pm on Thursday, and arrive at 7.30pm on Thursday.  The kids found this hilarious

• The flight was pretty good, all things considered.  The kids binged Harry Potter films and got a few hours sleep, no-one spewed or had a meltdown worth recording for posterity, and we got there

• Having read a lot about horror stories at US Customs, I was 1% worried – surely I’d liked enough Trump memes to provide grounds for deportation.  But it was fine, and surprisingly quick – the Customs agent was heroically gruff and joyless, but we got in

• We got in a giant yellow NY cab (4 x suitcases, 4 x backpacks, 2 x car seats) with a driver who looked about 90 and wasn’t at all concerned with lanes or indication.  If we’d had more sleep it might have been terrifying.  We got to the hotel, got some slices of pizza from the deli down the road, and got to bed by midnight.  Result! 

• And then at 3am Kitty was wide awake, and then we were all wide awake too, and that was that.  Hotel breakfast opened at 6am and we were there on the dot.  NYC has been having a heatwave, so getting out and about early felt like a good plan.  The High Line, a former elevated train line turned into dozens of blocks of elevated urban park, was walking distance, and we were climbing the stairs by 7, with the city still quiet and peaceful with only joggers and early commuters about

• The High Line is fantastic, with amazing views, loads of artwork, and a ton of greenery attracting birds and insects.  We particularly liked the giant pigeon

• It was already getting hot – the high was forecast to be 36, and by 8am it was already getting towards the high 20s and roasting out of the shade.  We figured it might be a little cooler out on the water, and headed down to catch the Staten Island Ferry, a free commuter ferry popular with tourists due to cracking views of the Statue of Liberty

• New York is a lot to take in, but even more so in mid-30s heat and on next to no sleep.  So obviously we dragged the girls up to the full-on sensory overload of Times Square in the evening

• We made a good start on our NYC bingo card:

  • Squirrel!

  • Families in matching outfits

  • Bonsai dog

  • Bonsai dog in handbag

  • Bonsai dog wearing shoes

  • Yelling on the subway

• Everyone then slept for over 12 hours and we barely made it outside before lunchtime, so on average we were doing pretty well.  We subwayed across to Brooklyn and the DUMBO area.  DUMBO stands for “down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass”.  If you ask me, that’s an acronym that’s trying way too hard, but it’s a pretty good area to spend a little while.  There’s some cracking views of bridges and the Manhattan skyline, and a neat little flea market underneath the overpass itself.  The market was a real hipster paradise, selling mini-watches-as-rings and vinyl-as-notebooks, and with a whole lot of Gen Zs mesmerised by a stall selling old analog and digital cameras.  Walking back to Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge is a great time, with fantastic views back to city

• As we walked around the city we saw loads of seemingly random lines, and tried to guess by the composition of queuers whether it was for Labubus, a new ramen pop-up, or whatever else TikTok advises is worth standing in a long line for this week

• The Rockefeller plaza is hugely impressive, with epic art deco skyscrapers and some rad sculptures.  It would amazing to see in winter with the ice rink and Christmas paraphenalia

• We found some pretty great Korean donuts in a beautifully designed store near our place, with some of the worst coffee ever poured by mankind.  America, is it a weird badge of pride that you submit yourselves to objectively horrific coffee?

• We enjoyed a few hours at the Museum of Modern Art, which had just about enough stuff that the kids liked to allow the adults to enjoy themselves.  The star attraction is Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, which hosts a scrum of eager selfie-takers dozens deep.  The 1880s-1940s floors also hosts Dali, Monet, and Picasso and there’s load of fascinating stuff in the 1950s-1970s section:  Warhol, Rothko, Pollock, Lichtenstein, and my fave, Piet Mondrian.  The kids like the whole-room-sized “F-111” by James Rosenquist

• We checked in early at JFK, which gave us time to visit the TWA hotel & bar.  I remember TWA as an airline brand in my childhood, but they’re harking back much further to the mid-century modern awesomeness of the early 60s and the excitement and optimism of the “jet age”.  There’s a lovely sunken lounge area, a giant Twister room, a recreated hair salon that the girls loved, and a giant plane repurposed as a cocktail bar

• I brought my running gear, but it hasn’t come out of the suitcase yet.  Maybe in England

• BEERWATCH:  Nothing especially notable, although finding Stone Arrogant Bastard on tap was welcome