Notes on a recent trip to Europe
I ended up spending a week in Paris and London this month since my ex-wife’s trip to Europe with the kids had Father’s Day weekend in the middle of it and we decided that it could be fun for me to take the kids that weekend on a vacation within the vacation.
My last trip to Paris was a dozen years ago and England was sometime in the last century. There’s a new visa requirement for US visitors to the UK that I only discovered by accident a month before our trip, although fortunately the processing is pretty quick and painless, albeit requiring the downloading of an app to my phone to manage everything.
Most of my time in Paris was dedicated to flânerie, walking the outer arrondissements of Paris in search of stories for what will eventually be a collection of twenty stories set in Paris, one for each arrondissement (you can read my story for the premier online, but the publication which carried my story for the dix-huitième has ceased publication and isn’t in the internet archive).
The train between Paris and London was fairly nice, with more legroom than coach seating on a plane, although less than most Amtrak coaches. The ride was smooth and fast, although both trips arrived about half an hour later than scheduled. The wifi onboard was effectively useless, even for accessing what was theoretically locally-served content for entertainment, but in some ways it was nice to get some enforced offline time.
I noticed also that magazines are still very much a thing in both London and Paris. Here in the U.S., they still exist, but they’re not something that you see as often as you used to (there used to be big magazine racks in Walgreens, Jewel, etc. carrying a variety of publications and now they only have those weird special issue things that look like magazines but aren‘t).
The most notable thing, though came from losing my daughter’s medication on the trip to London.
In the U.S., even if you’re at home, if you discover you’ve lost your medication on a Saturday, you’re going to be almost certainly out of luck. In London, however, I went to the pharmacy at the train station near our hotel and was given contact info for a private health care provider. They didn’t have any appointments available, but knowing what to look for, I was able to find another one via the Google and had an online appointment literally five minutes after I found the site. The doctor emailed me a code that I was able to take to any pharmacy to get the prescription filled. Compare the experience in the U.S., where the doctor would send the prescription to one specific pharmacy which would end up being the only place you can get the prescription filled.
I went back to the train station pharmacy and the pharmacist gave me the bad news: he didn’t have the prescription in stock.
I’ve been in this situation at home before. You end up calling every pharmacy individually and seeing if they have it in stock and then—if you’re lucky—the original pharmacy can transfer the prescription there or—if you’re not lucky—you need to have the doctor transfer the prescription there. And then, hopefully they still have it in stock when you arrive.
That’s not how it works in the U.K. While in the U.S., apparently, each Walgreens, CVS, etc. keeps it a secret what medications they have on their shelves, in the U.K., the pharmacist was able to give me the address and phone number of a pharmacy which had the medicine in stock. I took the kids on an expedition to Waterloo station and bam, we had the medicine.
The pharmacist where we picked up the medicine was very apologetic about the cost for the medicine, wanting to make sure that I was willing to pay for it since it wouldn’t be covered by insurance. My daughter needed the medicine so I said yes, I’d pay.
She rang it up.
£9.90 ($13.50)
This is less than our co-pay with insurance in the U.S. for the medicine.
And this is the experience as uninsured foreigners in the U.K. For people who are actually on the national health, everything is easier and cheaper.
Recommendation
I couldn’t find any travel adapters when I was packing (I think my wife got all of them in the divorce) so I bought one off Amazon.
In addition to the usual set of plugs for Europe, the UK , Australia and the US, it also has a set of USB A and C plugs for charging. I found this absolutely wonderful for traveling, being able to charge my assorted electronics: watch, phone, hearing aids while still having an outlet that I can also plug in the adapter for my laptop. On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I was staying in a motel where there was an extreme deficit of outlets to plug things into and I’m thinking that this will be an essential item in my travel bag even when I’m traveling domestically.