Euro trip with mom and dad

My mom and dad visited me last Spring..yes I know it's been a while already :-P Got no motivation to update my blog lately. Life was bit busy especially with my short-time travels that I did quite often this year :-P

My parents arrived in Germany end of April. It was my dad's first time to visit Europe but my mom's second time. I hadn't booked any trip yet when they came since everything depends on their physical ability (e.g. jet lag recovery etc), but I had some itineraries for sure. My dad wanted to visit Italy so I prepared an itinerary to visit Rome and Venice (plus Milan since I found cheaper flight tickets to Milan compared to Rome or Venice).

I was surprised when the next day after they arrived, both my mom and dad were so excited to start their European trip already, so we decided to visit the Netherlands for the long weekend. We had a day trip to Roermond (yup..a shopping trip indeed...) but I like Roermond city center too, it's quite a lovely small city. The next day we took the Duess-Venlo train route again, this time to Amsterdam (only a glance of Amsterdam actually) and Volendam then stayed over night in Den Haag. We managed to walked around Den Haag in the next day after visiting the lovely Keukenhof and had lunch in Java House (my fave Indonesian resto in DH :-P). Then we headed to Roosendaal to visit my aunt before returned back to Duesseldorf. My dad was so excited with the whole train trip (thanks also to my 40% disc card :-P), he always wrote down the name of every station that we passed through in his notes :-)

The next week was some relaxing days in Duess for my parents since I had to work :-P (but also to give them some recovery time after quite a long journey). We departed to Milan in the weekend, quite early in the morning (I took one week holiday). We still had some time to experience Milan with its Duomo. Which was actually my hidden agenda since the last time I visited Milan the Duomo was still under construction. Milan's Duomo is one of the most beautiful cathedrals that I have visited imo. Then we took train (that I have booked before) to Rome. We arrived in Rome late in the afternoon after finally managed to find the office of the apartment that we rented (it's quite an adventure with our luggage and considering that my parents did not get used to walk that much, oh and plus it was quite warm in Rome). Had a relaxing evening in the apartment, the location was great, only less than 50m to the famous Colosseum also it has small supermarket and some restaurants nearby). We stayed in Rome for three nights (but only) two days since we left Rome in the morning to Venice. Rome was definitely nice and has a lot of things to offer but my parents were not that happy with such crowded, noisy and warm Rome (they said they like Duess more :-P) ...

We arrived in Venice late afternoon after quite a long train trip. Again a bit adventure to get the apartment keys. But this time I learned from our previous experience, I asked my parents to wait at the train station with our luggage so that I could find the office of the apt rental faster. The apt in Venice was better than the one in Rome. It's more modern and also cheaper. We still had some time to walked around Venice that day (and my mom likes it a lot..yup a lot of nice shops :-P), visited San Marco, did some window shopping, and bought some stuff in the supermarket close to the apartment. We only stayed one night in Venice (the one that my mom regretted :-P..). After doing some walk around again and some photo sessions, we left Venice for Milan in the afternoon. Our flight back to Duess was late evening from Milan.

We returned back from Italy on Wednesday night after spending five days there. Initially I planned to take my parents to Paris for the weekend but could not find the cheap tickets to go there anymore. Accidentally I found a good train ticket deal to Bruges (38EUR return/person with ICE). Bruges is one of my fave cities, so we went there on Friday morning and spent two days there. Bruges was still lovely but it was quite cold and rainy when we were there.

The next week, the third week, was another relaxing days for my parents (and I worked again), but that Thursday was a bank holiday and I took another day off on Friday so we had a long weekend to explore some places around Duess before my parents left for Indonesian on Sunday. We went to Bonn-Bruehl-Koeln and also explored Duess too :-P I invited some friends for lunch to meet my parents. And yeah it was great having my parents here, happy that they are still healthy for the long trip and we also had fun baking some cookies and cooking together in my apartment. I took them to Frankfurt on Sunday and was really glad that they enjoyed their three-week holiday in Europe.
Thanks a lot mom and dad for the visit, love you always :-)
See our pics here.