Travel with Kevin and Ruth: Trying to figure a plan!

Well, it looks like we're definitely going to have a visitor in August. We haven't booked it yet, but we think we've devised a plan to have grandson Cameron (12) come and tour some of Europe with his grandma and grandpa.

Most of the logistical problems relate to the fact that they live near Halifax, Nova Scotia and there aren't many direct flights from Halifax to anywhere across the pond. He can only fly direct to either London, or Frankfurt.

And he has to fly direct because of his age. Unaccompanied minors are not allowed to do connecting flights to most international destinations, although there are exceptions. Besides which he's still pretty young to be doing that on his own anyhow.

So our choices are he could do direct to London and we pick him up there and he travels with us to Dulmen, Germany where we drop off Max and then the three of us go to Frankfurt where we drop him off for his return flight from Frankfurt and we carry on to Paris. This is the most expensive option for his flights.

Or, he does roundtrip direct from Halifax to Frankfurt. This is about $600 cheaper for his flights, but means at least 1,000 kms (620 miles) more driving for us. Not only the cost of the fuel, but of course the time involved as well. However, if we do this route, we would include a visit to the tiny country of Liechtenstein, which we would really like to include in our list of visited countries!

So, we're going to ponder on this for a day or two and just weigh out the pros and cons.

Yesterday, it rained on and off all day and we didn't do very much other than some driving.

The day started off okay though.

Another narrow road to get back to the main highway!

Yes, Max had to drive through that.

The town of Ballina.

Lots of these type of ruins in this area.

The Split Rock.

Deposited by the retreat of the last ice age.

You can read the legend if you click on the photo.

Heading towards Sligo.

Another narrow lane leading to a cemetery.

Max, parked at GPS 54.275777, -8.392868

Had to do some work to get us level, but we managed.

The caretaker came by to do some gardening. He approached Max, and we had the door open. At first, I thought he was going to tell us we couldn't stay, but he was a super friendly guy and wanted to know where we were from. Wished us a pleasant evening, and said that we wouldn't have any trouble from our neighbors!