When planning the trip, each family member picked a destination where they wanted to go. And then it was up to us parents, to make it work. Mike picked the Yukon. I chose a Live-aboard boat, and Izzie selected Legoland. Now, it was Julie’s pick (or at least it was supposed to be). She had picked Disneyland. During the circumnavigation, the closest Disney park on our route was Paris Disneyland. So, it was added to the itinerary. When we actually got down to planning this leg, we realized that getting from Siena to Paris and then to Barcelona (our next planned stop) would be difficult. Without much backtracking and/or flying, we would spend 30 hours on a train to make this happen. Rail passes do not work as well as we once remembered because the “reservation fees” are much more common now, and going to Paris involved many of them. We could have flown for less than the booking fees! But at this point, we’ve flown 16 times in 6 months and feel quite guilty about our carbon footprint, so we really wanted to take advantage of the train pass. Instead, we got Julie excited about some theme parks in Spain and convinced her that we could skip Disney. She was satisfied, but we did not feel the best about it.

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