Travel log: Journey to Italy with kids in the backseat
For this year’s summer family vacation, we decided to try the so-called “car vacation”. A popular form of vacation, but our main vacations have previously mostly been chartered flights to an all-inclusive resort on Rhodes. But while it can be relaxing with such a vacation where you don’t have to think of anything at all, we figured we could also get two weeks of vacation for the same price as one week on an all-inclusive resort. We have done smaller road trips in Denmark and to northern parts of Germany, so taking the jump to drive all the way to Italy was a big step. Thankfully everything went well and we will likely do the same next year.
The trip
Our destination was a camping village in Venetian Lagoon where we had a 34m2 mobile home for a week. We had two overnight stops, first in Fulda which is more or less right in the middle of Germany, and in Flachau - a ski village in Austria. Practically all of this is one highway, making for fairly tedious but still sort of relaxing driving. It is possible to drive to Italy with only one overnight stay (and some even do it all in one go), but we prioritised making the trip part of the vacation and not merely aiming for the farthest possible distance. Neither my wife or myself are up for driving at night with little sleep, so we wanted to arrive at our destinations around late afternoon.
When you have two kids in the backseat for so many hours, you need to keep them occupied. Neither of us would be very good drivers if they were constantly fighting. I have previously written about the dillemmas of screen time and I have since changed my approach a bit. YouTube is currently out, as I found it to be too much passive pacification with slop content. It has instead been replaced with more gaming on the iPads, which I think is a perfectly acceptable activity on long trips. Both our daughters can play Minecraft for longer periods, and we also got Apple Arcade, which includes some decent casual arcade games with no ads or microtransactions. In addition, I have myself become quite fond of the wordplay game Dear Reader. Somehow they can also spend quite a lot of time simply creating playlists and finding music to listen to. I can have my personal opinions on their taste in various YouTubers and their music, but then we can have our own driving playlist on the front seats. All in all, we generally had pretty undramatic driving days. That their screen time was through the roof on those days is something I think is totally okay given the circumstances.
Food
Food and kids aren't always easy to handle. You need to be well prepared to have snacks ready at all times, but especially eating out can be a challenge with how picky kids can often be with what they like. At home it is possible to give them something else, but they can take one look at the plate at a restaurant and decide stubbornly that they hate it. So as a parent, you often take the safe bet choices, which admittedly does often involve chicken nuggets, fries, pizza and pasta.
On the road we simply did McDonald's for lunch. They are scattered frequently along the highways, you know what you get, the kids get a little toy surprise and it is fast. No, it ain't exactly healthy, but the other food choices a long the German highways aren’t much better anyways.
During the vacation we almost exclusively went out to eat or got some takeaway for the evening dinner. It wasn’t exactly fine dining, but generally decent enough and compared to Danish restaurants reasonably priced. For two adults and two kids, we usually could do it around €60-90. Breakfast and lunch we made ourselves, usually just yoghurt, bread and sandwiches. Next time, we will probably like to make dinner a bit more often, as the takeaway became a bit samey. Maybe brring our air frier. For myself, I came to like the Birra Moretti beer quite a bit and brought a case home with me.
Even though we stayed at a very touristy camping resort, I did find the prices fairly reasonable. A coffee at the pool bar was €2 and a decent cocktail was €11, which compared to Danish prices at least, are not bad. While it is nice to have all-inclusive as it removes the need to think about spending while you are there, I don’t think it is actually worth it. And probably healthier as you don’t go to the bar constantly, but buy a few when you actually feel like having one, and not simply trying to maximise what you have paid for in advance.
What we did
In short, a whole lot of mostly nothing. We used the pool area most days, took a short drive to a massive outdoor water park one day, and just generally took our time with no strict schedule. I got to read more, there were daily fun activities and competitions in the pool and even something as simple as throwing a ball to each other can be amazing quality family time.
People often ask if we “went to see something”, and admittedly we didn’t get to experience much authentic Italian culture or cities. We were close to Venice and could have taken a boat there, but to go to Venice just feels like one of those overcrowded touristy landmarks that seems like a “must-see”, but I often hear it isn’t that amazing, and not really something the kids would get much out of. But there is some expectation, at least from some people, that you have to see something special when you are on vacation. To the point where they can be almost offended if you tell them you just stayed at your resort for the entire vacation. I understand the sentiment that you should also learn about and experience other cultures when you have the privilege to be able to travel. I agree with that. There is just a time and place for everything, depending on what you and your family want from a vacation at this point in your life. This was what we wanted to do this summer, and we have other types of smaller trips and vacations throughout the year. In October we are going to London for a few days, which will be a totally different kind of vacation giving new kind of experiences for both us and the kids.
I still think we gave our kids a sense of the wider world and what it means to be in a different country that speaks a different language. Especially on our long journey through Europe. On the way out we stayed two nights in Fulda, which is a medium-sized town in the middle of Germany. Just walking around a normal city, going into shops, getting lunch and getting a feel for the city. On the way back we stayed two nights in Flachau, a skiing village in Austria, and spent the day with a drive on the mountainous twisty roads and later took a cable car up to a little walking path on the slopes. While none of that included any historical sites, it did foster a ton of questions from the two girls about all kinds of things we don’t have or get to see in Denmark. Especially the landscape in Austria is very different from our flat country, which is an amazing experience in itself.
Car problems
No car vacation without some sort of technical problems. On our very last day home, the car wouldn’t start in the morning. Our battery was dead. Had to wait an hour for the autohilfe to arrive and get the engine kickstarted. Later we stopped for lunch and had to call again for assistance. This time we were told to not turn the engine off and try to get home. That meant we couldn’t take our planned ferry route from Puttgarden to Rødby, but had to drive the longer way around across the bridge Storebæltsbroen. Getting fuel for that many kilometres could be a problem when we couldn’t stop the car, but we were so very lucky that my sister-in-law's husband is good with cars and was willing to replace the battery for us, if we could stop by. Which was on the way home with just about 100km left, and we arrived pretty late, but he did it and the car has been running smoothly afterwards. Forever grateful.
Pretty annoying that we just before the vacation we had the car for a service checkup, and specifically said we wanted to ensure everything was running smoothly before we went south. Apparently, it is usually recommended to change the car battery after about five years and our car is six years old. With all the mostly unnecessary stuff car mechanics try to sell you, I do find it odd they didn’t mention that. We would gladly have paid their fee.
While I had previously been sceptical of this kind of vacation, this will likely be our preferred longer summer vacation for the next years. 30°C in Italy is definitely preferred to the 38-40°C in Rhodes. None of us really like high temperatures or getting tanned; we are mostly seeking pleasant temperatures and freedom to relax. However, I don’t think we could have done this before now as it likely would have been more problematic driving for so long when the girls were younger. We also only just recently got a big enough car, making such trips way more comfortable.
