Eurotrip Stop Seveneightnine – The Czech Adventures

I am free and that is why I am lost.
Franz Kafka

When I made plans for my summer Eurotrip, the schedules of my two sons did not align. Zylan was available early summer, but Ronan was not because he had summer drill for the National Guard. Therefore, I decided that each son would accompany me on a different leg of my trip: Zylan would join me in Switzerland, and Ronan would join me in the Czech Republic.

Anyone with more than one child knows the importance of equity; you don’t want to bestow one of your children with more gifts, time, or attention than the other or others. I did my best when planning my Eurotrip so that each of my sons would have a memorable experience with me because I didn’t want either to perceive that they were joining me for the leg of the trip that was lacking, that his brother had a better time or saw more with dad. Furthermore, an additional complication is that each of my sons have different personalities and interests. Zylan is more outspoken and artsy; Ronan is more introverted and outdoorsy, so I needed to tailor activities in each country to personality of son traveling with me.

Was I successful with my attempt at travel equity?

During my trip with Zylan to Switzerland, we mostly focused our travels to Interlaken and Lauterbrunnen. We stayed in an Airbnb overlooking the Lauterbrunnen Valley, and the Alpine vista with waterfalls of snowmelt cascading down the cliffs of the valley was truly sublime. I was thrilled to have this experience with my oldest son, but part of me was worried that the Czech Republic would not be as enchanting for my youngest son. However, as Zylan and I traveled around Switzerland, I was trying to be a little more frugal because everything in Switzerland is so expensive; all the prices seemed calculated by a NASA cost estimator. Thus, I limited Zylan to two restaurant meals per day. In the morning, he ate muesli for breakfast, and we drank instant coffee. Additionally, we traveled throughout Switzerland by train, but that was part of the adventure and not so much a cost saving nature. When we got to Bern, I thought that he could do a little bit of shopping and thrifting, activities that he enjoys. But unbeknownst to me, there is a Swiss holiday called Whit Monday, and all the stores were closed for the weekend that we were in Bern, so we ended up sightseeing around the city, window shopping at all the closed stores, eating and drinking at the cafes, and watching Top Gun: Maverick. And, aside from me booking an Airbnb our last night in Zurich in what seemed to be the prostitute neighborhood, a very expensive PCR test, and an annoying delay with Zylan checking into his flight (see my blog post about Switzerland), we had an overall enjoyable time together.

During my trip to the Czech Republic with Ronan, I planned to rent a car and drives us to different locations in the country to see some locations that I hoped would be as scenic as the Switzerland and the Lauterbrunnen Valley. We would visit Dolni Morava to walk across the Skybridge 721, the purported longest suspension bridge in the world. Next, we would visit the Ardspach rock formations. Lastly, we would drive across the German border to Switzerland Saxony. The region of the Czech Republic and Germany is renowned for its natural beauty; thus, it is known as “Switzerland” Saxony. There was only one problem with my plan: my US driver’s license had expired last year after my Stateside visit, and I haven’t had the chance to renew it. I learned about this when visiting Cyprus, but the rental agency there accepted my Qatar driver’s license. I wasn’t so sure if I would have the same luck in Czech Republic.

I arrived in Prague a couple days before Ronan, so I explored and photographed the sites in the city that were of interest to me. I wandered the Old Town, visited the Mucha Gallery and Kafka Museum, and ate at the restaurants that wouldn’t interest my little boy. I refer to Ronan affectionately and absurdly as my “little boy,” even though he’ll be 21 this year, deadlifts 450 pounds, and is a combat trained infantry personnel. Still, in my heart of hearts, he’ll always be the little boy with curly hair that craved candy as well as desserts and was fascinated but afraid of the Jersey Devil. This image is one of the innermost rings of my concentric memory of Ronan.

The day that my little boy was to arrive in Prague, I took the shuttle bus to the airport a couple hours early. That day I was unsure of two things: if Ronan would arrive on time and if I would be allowed to rent the car that I reserved. So, it was best that I sort out the car situation before my son arrived. When I arrived at the car rental agency, there was a short queue, and as I was waiting, the people attempting to rent cars were being rejected because their credit card limits were too low for the rental deposit. Thankfully, I had activated one of my US credit cards for international transactions, and there was zero balance on the card. Yet, there was the matter of my expired US driver’s license.

When it was my turn in line, I handed the rental receptionist my US passport, Qatar ID, and Qatar driver’s license. He looked at my Qatar ID and driver’s license and asked, “What are these?” I implored, I am a resident of Qatar and haven’t been back to the US in five years. He barked back, “It is not possible to rent a car with these!” So, I did the only thing that I could and handed him my expired US driver’s license. This seemed to satisfy him, and he started to process my car rental. I didn’t say anything more and watched him as he entered information from my passport and driver’s license waiting for him to notice the expiration date. However, he handed back my forms of identification and then asked for my credit card, which I quickly handed to him. He ran the card and then handed me my rental documents and car keys. I silently thanked lady luck, quickly left the rental agency, and then happily headed to the terminal to await my son’s arrival.

Ronan arrived shortly afterwards. Aside from having to run from one airport gate to another when connecting in Warsaw, Poland, he didn’t have any real flight issues. Although, he said that his airplane seat was uncomfortable, that the battery of his headphones died so that he couldn’t watch the downloaded movies on his phone, and that he didn’t sleep much during his 12-hour transatlantic flight. He seemed slightly annoyed; however, he endured bootcamp a year ago, so these travel inconvenience seemed mostly tolerable.

You hungry, little boy? I asked. “Yeah, I am starving,” Ronan answered. “Is there a gym at an Airbnb? I need to get a workout in.” Thus, began one of the differences between my trip with Ronan and his older brother, Zylan: Ronan wanted to maintain some semblance of his workout and eating regimen. Finding gyms wasn’t too much of a problem for Ronan. He would hop on his phone and search for nearby gyms with day passes. The bigger problem was that Ronan is a picky eater, and if he isn’t able find something on a restaurant menu, or even read the menu, then this bothers him. Thankfully, for his first meal of the trip, I was waiting to eat at Johnny’s Pizza, which was recommended to me. Ronan was leery about what constituted Czech pizza. “There won’t be anything weird on this pizza, will there?” he questioned. Just wait and see. I countered. He was too hungry to interrogate me further. We picked up the rental car, navigated the crazy road system of Prague, located a parking spot, dropped off Ronan’s luggage at the Airbnb (located on the sixth floor of a building sans an elevator), and headed to Johnny’s.

When we got to Johnny’s, we ordered two beers and a large pizza with five different meat toppings. Ronan was happy with this choice because he didn’t want to eat any weird vegetables. About 15 minutes later, a very large thin crust pizza with ample meat arrived on our table. Ronan looked pleased with the pizza, and after he scarfed down a slice, I asked him how he would rank the pizza. A couple years ago, while on a summer trip with Zylan and Ronan, I learned that Ronan has a food ranking system. If asked to rank food, he will give you a rating on a scale of one to ten. Ronan said that the pizza at Johnny’s was a nine. Really? I queried. “Yeah, I don’t even know what a ten would taste like, but this is really good.” Maybe in Plato’s world of forms there exists the ideal pizza that would receive a ten on Ronan’s ranking system; however, Johnny’s would have to be content with a score from Ronan that was just short of perfect.

After our pizza dinner, I wanted to take Ronan to the National Museum and then to Old Town in Prague. At the museum, he was mostly interested while we perused the mineral section, but the longer we explored, I could see that he was running out of gas. So, I asked Ronan if he felt like heading back to the Airbnb for an early night. He said, “Yes.” That concluded the first day of the trip.

The next day, before we set out on the road, Ronan went to work out. When he came back, he had a Whooper and fries with him. Can you eat in the car? “Yeah,” he responded. Then shower up and let’s get going. I was antsy to start driving because the parking situation in Prague was not quite clear, and I wanted to leave the city before I incurred parking tickets. Ronan quickly showered, and we were on the road in 20 minutes.

During my trip with Zylan, we were able to travel entirely using the Swiss public transportation system, which was affordable and efficient. Because of the locations I wanted to visit with Ronan, I though renting a car would be most convenient. And, aside from having to drive through crazy rural roads in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Germany, having a rental car was the better option for us. Though the destinations that I wanted to visit were accessible by train, having a car didn’t restrict us to a train schedule and gave us the freedom to explore the region more.

Ronan and I made it to the first destination of the trip, Dolni Morava, without any issues, and the next morning, we walked across the Skybridge as the morning fog was dissipating from the forest below. Then we raced down the mountain on the alpine track. That evening we drove over to Kraliky and viewed the area from an overlook.

The second destination of the trip was the Ardspach region of the Czech Republic. There we would explore the national park. The park was beautiful with picturesque rock formations, but Ronan seemed annoyed with how sections of the park were roped off and with the crowds of people enjoying the scenery with us. He wanted the opportunity to explore without restrictions and not have a bunch of people in his way. Understandable. We had extra day in Ardspach, so we drove across the border into Karpacz, Poland to see a stave church and learn about the Spirit of the Mountain in a folklore museum. That morning in Poland, we stopped at McDonald’s, and Ronan ate a breakfast sandwich with pork that he said was one of the most notable meals of the trip. 🤷 The other silver lining to the Ardspach destination was that there was a gym 20 minutes away so Ronan could work out. He would go deadlift, and I would wait in the pub, order an Americano, and edit my photos. After Ronan’s workout, we would eat dinner. It was during our meals at the Svejk restaurant Ronan discovered that he liked schnitzel and bread dumplings. He said that when he went back to the US, he was going to try pounding out his chicken breasts and frying them. In addition, I also bought some mix from the grocery store so that he could try making bread dumpling when he was Stateside.

Our third destination on the trip was Switzerland Saxony. We first visited an ossuary and then drove across the German border and located our Airbnb in a small German village. That night we explored the Bastei Bridge, and the next day, because it was raining, we drove to Festung Konigstein to explore the fort. Needing to do something indoors, I asked Ronan if he wanted to drive to Dresden to visit a mall. He was ok with the idea, and the mall was fine, but I found Dresden to be a dreary city, and Ronan seemed to concur with this sentiment.

Finally, the day before Ronan was scheduled to fly out, we drove back to Prague. We dropped off the rental car at the airport and took the shuttle back into the city. He got in a workout, and we ate at Johnny’s for his final meal. That evening we walked through the Old Town—like I wanted to do on the first night of our trip, except he was too jetlagged then.

This would have been a perfect last night of his trip.

However, the next day, for no reason, Ronan’s connecting flight to Warsaw, Poland was cancelled. We spent 8 hours queued in line so that we could get a rescheduled flight. Ronan would fly out two days later! This cancellation cut into the time I had scheduled for the next leg of my trip in Amsterdam, Netherlands. But what could I do? I needed to spend more time with my little boy before he was able to fly out.

So, Ronan and I shifted Airbnbs in Prague one last time. He got in another workout, and we ate some more meals in the lovely and inexpensive city. Still, we both were looking forward to a resolution to the trip, and the next day, when the airline attendant handed him his boarding, both of us were relieved. We had one more meal together at the airport Burger King. The spicy chicken nuggets didn’t score too high on his ranking system. But, it was a adequate last meal to the trip. Then I accompanied him to security gate, hugged him, and watched my little boy disappear behind the security wall on his way back to the US.

So, was Zylan’s leg of my Eurotrip better than Ronan’s? Was I able do enough with Ronan throughout the Czech Republic to have as scenic a trip as I had with his older brother in Switzerland?

The long answer is that I tailored each trip, as best I could, to the interests and personality of each of my sons. I spent time with each of them exploring an unfamiliar country. I had conversations with them, trying to learn about their current outlooks on the world and what their goals were for the future. I tried to show them how to travel easily and enjoyably, to not be afraid of the unfamiliar, and when confronted with the unexpected, to be patient and do your best to problem solve. I spent time with them, compromised with them, and challenged them.

The short answer is that each one of my sons had their own adventure with me. I don’t endeavor to treat each of my boys the same because there is no true equity when it comes to individuals. Each one of them engages with and responds to the world differently. I did my best to facilitate their specific engagement and tried to notice their responses in order to craft an adventure with me that was enjoyable for each of them. Individuals can’t experience joy in the world the exact same way, but they can experience joy in different ways, and these differences can be every bit as meaningful.

Zylan will always have Switzerland. And, Ronan will always have the Czech Republic (with a little Poland and Germany added).

The following are pictures from the adventures Ronan and I had in the Czech Republic.