Meet Gram and Pap
We are Lorrie and Jack Howard, aka Gram and Pap. We love to travel, Europe especially, and we would like to share our adventures with you. For the past 31 years, we have spent our lives together, raised our family of 5 unique and wonderful kids, who in turn have given us 6 beautiful grandkids, to date.
Trips we have taken
Our European travels started on the day after Christmas, 2017 when we got on a flight from Pittsburgh, Pa to Brussels, Belgium to visit my brother and sister-in-law in The Netherlands. On that trip, we also visited Germany and Belgium. We had traveled before this trip to several of the States and Canada, but had never been any farther abroad.
Since that first trip, we have been to Ireland with my Mom and Lorrie’s sister. Lorrie and I then flew to Frankfurt, Germany, rented a car and drove over 1600 miles through Germany, France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria and back to Germany. Then, just recently we booked an 8 night trip to England with a short visit to one castle in Wales.
Our strategy
We book our trips early to save some money, use mostly short term rentals for our accommodations. Hotels are ok on certain occasions, but only for very specific reasons that a house or apartment rental didn’t fit the bill. The short term rental market, for us, is less expensive and much more of what we want for a place to stay. So far, we have rented cars for most of our trips. This allows us to get to places that public transportation may not go.
Future trips
We plan and book some things well in advance, but we also leave time to explore things that you may not know about until you get local.
This site will also include our plans for upcoming trips as well as our way of taking the “road less travelled by…”.
If you follow along as I build this site, you will see my take on our trips and pictures that we took along the way. I will share things we learn and implement them to try to make the next trip even better.
Now that you know us a bit better, dust off your passport, pack up your travel bag and head over to our first blog post! Our first trip to Europe! Netherlands, Belgium and Germany