Road Trip Daydreams
My German driver's license arrived in the mail today!
You might recall that I applied to convert my Massachusetts driver's license to a German one back in October so this hasn't exactly been a quick process, but that was partly my fault. The German equivalent of the DMV sent me a provisional license in mid-December and asked me to mail them my US license before they would send me the official German one. And I just didn't get around to sending them my US license until a couple of weeks ago.
I've driven twice in Berlin using the provisional license, but now that I've got my official Führerschein instead of a flimsy slip of paper, I'm excited to go farther afield.
The main thing E and I are planning (pandemic-permitting, of course) is a road trip to Paris for my birthday. This has been in the works since last May when I saw that my favorite romance author (Alyssa Cole) was going to be at a book signing event in Paris on April 2, 2022 - my birthday. E bought us tickets and we felt fine about the prospect of losing that investment if, when the time came, we didn't feel comfortable going.
E and I road tripped together a few times in the US so we know we enjoy traveling that way and it feels safer than flying. I'm really hopeful we're able to make it happen and I started plotting our route the other day. We'd like to head to Paris via Brussels because we have friends who live there who we've been meaning to visit since we moved to Berlin. They had a daughter in early 2020 who we've never met so it would be really nice to catch up with them. We've also never been to Belgium and I love the idea of visiting a new country. I realized that on the way back to Berlin, we could head through Luxembourg and see two new-to-us countries. That's a lot of border crossings though so I'll need to double-check COVID regulations and make sure it's not an issue.
COVID precautions are, of course, the not fun part of my road trip daydreams. But I feel pretty confident that we'll be able to take some sort of trip for my birthday in a way that feels safe to us. And now that both of us can legally drive, our options have expanded. Even just leaving the city to go for a walk in the woods feels easier because we can share the load of getting there and back instead of E always having to be the one who drives us.
Over lunch today we talked about taking a drive somewhere this weekend. We'll probably just head to a nature preserve and take a walk but, if we wanted to, we could book a last minute vacation rental and do an overnight. Whether or not we decide to go anywhere, it's fun to think about the possibilities.