Travel Tips

Goteborg is the home of Volvo cars, the second largest city in Sweden and advertised as the friendliest city in Sweden. After spending 4 days there, we concur with the friendliest title. You can take delivery of your new Volvo and return it for shipment to the USA at various locations throughout Europe, additional charges involved. We elected to pick up and drop off at the FDC in Goteborg for a number of reasons, and we were happy we did. We decided to make this experience a "once in a lifetime" trip and planned to tour central and western Europe. We are already thinking about our next Volvo and touring Scandinavia. This time we went south and west.

If you elect to head south to central Europe, you will almost certainly have to go to/through Denmark. We drove from Goteborg to Malmo to Copenhagen, putting the first serious miles on our new car (all under 4000 rpm). The road is not heavily travelled, beautiful scenery, and you get to cross one of the largest suspension bridges in Europe (for a hefty toll). It took us a little bit better than 3 hours driving, but we were not in a hurry and made frequent stops. Copenhagen was great! We stayed at the Amager International Youth Hostel where we had a two bed, family room. Having a International Youth Hostel Card made things easy.. We left the car at the hostel and toured the city by bus, boat, and foot.

From Copenhagen, we did a full day of serious driving to get to Arnhem in the Netherlands. It is the location of the John Frost Bridge, named for the British Paratroop Battalion Commander of WWII "Market Garden" fame. This is the "Bridge Too Far". Again, we stayed at an International Youth Hostel. This time our family room had a private bath. We used Arnhem as a base to cover the route and cities of the "Market Garden" operation, including Eindhoven and Niijmegen (sp.). Three helpful hints: 1)we used a ferry from Denmark to Germany and did NOT take advantage of Volvo discounts with the Stena ferry line-we should have 2)Finding the youth hostel was not easy, we should have used better maps from www.shellgeostar.com to plan our route 3)It takes a long time to drive anywhere in the Netherlands.

The picture was made overlooking the English Channel near Arromanches in Normandy, France. We drove from Netherlands to Normandy in one long day to see the D-Day Beaches. The car handled well, and as you can see, we got off the pavement a little to check out the AWD. We spent two nights in Normandy, one at Oestraham and the other in Ste. Mere Eglise.

From Ste. Mere Eglise it was a fairly short drive to Le Mont St. Michel. We opted to spend the night on the island in the Terrasses Poulard and ate omeletes at Madame Poulard's. Because we stayed overnight on the island, we got to park in the "A" lot, close to the entrance. Fortunately, the weather was good and the tide did not reach our new XC when it came in. We would certainly recommend spending the night. The Mont gets pretty quiet after 6 pm or so when the busloads of tourists leave for the day.

Wellll...... we consulted the map during our planning and decided La Rochelle was somewhere about halfway between Le Mont St. Michel and Bordeaux. When we tried to book a hotel room in La Rochelle, we had trouble finding a vacancy. Turns out that the very night we wanted to stay was the opening night of the La Pavois Boat Show. How could we spend the night and NOT go to the show. The photo shows a "ride", a boat in a large pool with a large wind machine causing the boat to heel over. Kids had lots of fun on this thing.

Bordeaux, St. Emilion & the Medoc. Is there any other part of the world that can compare when it comes to red wine? We think not! Here is our XC out on one of the small roads around St. Emilion where we camped for three nights. Highlights included the Thursday evening wine school in Bordeaux, St. Emilion (everything), and the reservations only tour of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild in Pauillac (Medoc).

Paris. What can you say? We stayed at the Bois de Boulogne Camping in the city. Our first three nights were in our tent, but when bad weather threatened, we moved to a caravan for the last two nights. We didn't challenge the Paris traffic with our new car, but as always, it provided a great base and support.