Episode 56: Living in Europe Doesn’t Mean Jet-Setting Around Europe
One of the supposed perks of living in Europe is that you can just hop on a cheap flight and spend the weekend in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, or wherever else strikes your fancy.
$25 flights! Weekend getaways! See all of Europe!
Well … sort of.
In this episode of As the Dinesens Turn, Jason and Tracy talk about the reality of travel when you actually live in Europe — especially when you're traveling as a family.
Those cheap flights do exist, but they're not quite as cheap or plentiful as they once were. Add four plane tickets, baggage fees, hotels, transportation, and the logistics of traveling with kids, and that spontaneous European weekend can get expensive very quickly.
Living in northern Portugal adds another wrinkle. Portugal isn't nearly as well connected by train to the rest of Europe as countries such as France or Germany, which means getting somewhere like Barcelona isn't necessarily as simple as hopping on a train.
Then there's the other kind of travel: getting back to the United States. With Jason traveling frequently to the U.S. for work, a lot of the family's travel budget ends up going toward airfare across the Atlantic rather than European vacations.
But maybe there's another way to look at it.
When Porto is less than an hour away, Spain is within driving distance, and the birthplace of Portugal is practically in your backyard, perhaps the Dinesens actually travel more than they think they do.
Jason and Tracy talk about cheap airlines, expensive gasoline, traveling with teenagers, their almost nonexistent history of child-free vacations, and why the European jet-setting lifestyle isn't quite as simple as it looks from the outside.
Plus, with graduation trips coming up, there may finally be some more European exploration on the horizon.
Welcome to another episode of As the Dinosons Turn. So I thought it would be interesting to talk about travel and the realities of travel when you're living in another country. And this is our reality. It may not be everyone else's reality.
SPEAKER_01That's also true.
SPEAKER_00I know people talk about oh, you can travel everywhere in Europe and hop on a $25 flight from the airport and fly to Rome this weekend or whatever.
SPEAKER_01Which is interesting because those flights do exist, but they don't exist as much as they used to. When I was living in Europe in the early 2000s, that was much easier to find. But the cost of air travel have definitely gone up over the years. I would say that yes, but if you're going with a family, it becomes way more complicated and you have to plan ahead. So if it were just me and you, I'd say, hmm, I wonder if there's a good ticket. And I would say, hey, guess what? I've got there are these tickets for this weekend. Let's just go and do our weekend holiday a weekend away. And I love those television shows of like 48-hour holiday in different cities and all of that kind of stuff. So you can totally do that. But it's not as common here as you would think, mainly because of family travel. It's a lot more complicated. So yes, it's the same as I think if you're traveling from one side of the United States to another side of the United States on plane now. I'd say hotels are pretty much about the same cost. It's just literally the logistics of getting someplace. If you can drive, you can go anywhere. If you can get there by train. Now we also live in a country that is not very connected to other countries by train. Iberian Peninsula is not as connected as, say, if in France, Germany, and that area to all of its surrounding countries. So we do have the Pyrenees Mountains to cause a few issues there. And Portugal and Spain are just now trying to connect their systems. And they say by 2030 we will have a connection.
SPEAKER_00So 2040, 2050, 2020.
SPEAKER_012035, I'm hoping. I don't know. Like they've got they've got a couple of highway connections now from the eastern border of Portugal to the western of Spain. There used to be only one way to get or two ways, and now there are several more. So they used to route you through certain highways. I'd say that that's part of what we're experiencing. I did the math because I really want to go to Barcelona. I really want to go to Barcelona a lot. And so I was like, okay, let's go to Barcelona. But for the four of us to go to Barcelona, it's a thousand euros there and back. Plus, the hotel is another because now they're giant. We need two hotel rooms. And we also because we've seen the impact of Airbnbs and illegal Airbnbs, we stay in hotels because we want to make sure that we're not taking housing away from a person. And so that's also a kind of a moral choice. But yeah, gasoline and airfare could come down, and I would be a happy camper. We would do a lot more.
SPEAKER_00Well, we find that going to the United States also is very expensive, and maybe it wouldn't be so bad if we lived in New York, if that's where we were from. And so we could go to Porto and get on that one flight a day that goes from Porto to JFK. Maybe that would be different. Although, even that, it's a thousand dollars just to do that.
SPEAKER_01I was gonna say it's 800 euro round trip, usually. So yeah, and that's without it's about a seat and bags. So with this, yeah, so well that's true.
SPEAKER_00That's just a cheap, a cheap economy ticket, and then you've got to check your bag, and then all that, and then times four for a family of four, that would be four thousand dollars every time you go back, even a direct flight. It is then you start adding on how to get to Orlando for the conferences. I mean, that could be upwards of two thousand dollars a person.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so we literally have to keep an eye on like Google Flights and other places, and then you really because there are this is also not gonna be shocking to anybody who's listening, there are more consumer protections on the European side of things, but also if you buy directly from the company instead of directly from buying from a like a third-party site or something, so you buy from the actual airline still, so there's still that as well because of the consumer protections. But Europe has now passed several laws that starting in 27, they're not going to be able to charge us for having bags. You have to be able to bring your bag on a flight because they think this is a ridiculous fee and all these other things. So we'll see what happens. I'm not sure if air travel will go down in any way or shape or form. If we lived in Lisbon, I think we would have a lot more option of cheaper flights and places to go. Ryanair is still Ryanair, you can pack your backpack, and but what I also love is they change the size of their permitted bags like every year and premark, which is the equivalent, I guess, of our target kind of thing. You have to buy a new travel backpack every year or two because Ryanair changes their sizes, and then they're also they're different than the sizes for like EasyJet or some of the other airlines, and so every airline has a different bag size. I'm like, it's crazy of what you can supposedly bring on for free. I think that this is probably the last year that boys will be able to go, if we can afford it, go to any conference travel. This is it, because Jack will be in the middle of working and then he'll go to university, and that won't happen then because he'll be on a university schedule. So this is the last year of all four of us maybe traveling. So that'll save some money.
SPEAKER_00That's true.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, we're gonna get to the point where I think once Jack can drive and he's got his own bank account now, and he earns money for his internships, but he earns money for a replacement of transportation costs at his food. He doesn't get a salary, that was really disappointing. We were hoping for more than he earned. Then he'll have some additional freedoms, and then we can leave him in charge. Maybe then it's you and me go off, honey. We've never really done that. We did that once, you remember? We went for a weekend to Bravo, we stayed at a Bravo hotel, and that was like maybe a year and a half ago, and they were like, No, you can't do that again. No, no, no, no, no, you can't. They didn't like that. We were like 20 minutes down the road.
SPEAKER_00That was only the second time ever that we've done something like that. The other was when we went to Spain in 2019 and left the community to Santiago, yeah. So it's been a long time coming.
SPEAKER_01It has been a long time coming.
SPEAKER_00We haven't done our own travel yet, so I think that maybe that's our next step is for our last travel was to your brother's wedding in Colorado.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Was our last child-free travel. It's August or late July of 2007.
SPEAKER_01Well, we got a honeymoon baby we did not anticipate we would get. So yeah. Um, it's been a while. We'll see what happens. It's kind of crazy.
SPEAKER_00But I think the point is that if you're single or you maybe a married couple with no kids, you can definitely travel and find some good deals.
SPEAKER_01And the other thing that I see is people use a lot of travel agents here. So travel agencies are still things where they give you all-inclusive prices and you buy a package. So buying packages is like a huge deal here, too. So I think that's another way to go. But if you're looking for the cheap holiday, it's definitely one of those let's go on Ryanair, easy jet, easy jet holiday is like such a big thing. And that's because of UK. I think that there are some what we would consider discount airlines, but they're not as discounted anymore as you would think they would be. That's a bummer.
SPEAKER_00No. I was thinking when we came up with this topic, it's something that ties into our downer show two episodes ago. Oh no. Everything that's good for the average person has to be made more difficult and less attainable.
SPEAKER_01I think it's definitely difficult and less attainable, but that's not to say that like people here still go on their holiday, you know. It's just they do one and they go, usually they'll go one place outside of country and then they go to the Algarve or go to like one place in country, is what I'm seeing. Because that's just the reality. I mean, you work a lot, and it's cost a lot now to just live. So I think that's just kind of the the world we're in now. I was like looking and just for instance, gallon like a gallon of gas, sorry, a liter of gas is two euros. So that's eight euro for a gallon of gas, which is like what like 950, $9.50 for a gallon of gas. So just that cost in and of itself is a lot. Yeah, so air travel because of fuel costs, I think is still really high.
SPEAKER_00There's just certain realities of it where it's not jet setting around everywhere.
SPEAKER_01No, but we also are total, we do have to admit, we're totally spoiled. Like we go to the birthplace of Portugal all the time and are in that city center, and it's a wonderful place. Or we go to Porto all the time, it's like 50 minutes away. We have the best time. We're in Braga. We could go to Spain more often than we do. We go to we went to Vigo and that was fun. That's like an hour and a half. It's just a lot of highway travel, it's all toll roads, too.
SPEAKER_00It depends on what your definition of travel is. I think the whole like you can go everywhere in European dollars.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that doesn't exist anymore. Definitely not.
SPEAKER_00My dad did that when he was in the army. He was stationed in Germany.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, what was that? Like 1960 something?
SPEAKER_001960 or 61. Yeah, they're gonna be. He went to Greece.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00He was he had women hanging off of his arms in front of the Eiffel Tower.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Well, I'd have to say that I think that you can still do that, but it's gonna be definitely more expensive. And there are still lots of places. If we didn't have to go back to the United States so often for work, then I think we could spend the money otherwise. But lately you've been going back every six to eight weeks.
SPEAKER_00True.
SPEAKER_01So that's a lot. You've got another one coming up in September, even, and so May, July, August, September, and then again in November. So that's a lot of travel, and that's where all our travel money is going. It's going to that kind of stuff, but not next year. Next year is our graduation trips. That's true, right? And that's gonna be fantastic. So that will give us an opportunity to do more Europe exploration for graduation trips. Exciting things.
SPEAKER_00All right, join us again next time for another episode.