A Grand-ish Tour

Working as a journalist in luxury travel can sometimes feel like being at an all-you-can-eat buffet, except what’s behind the sneeze guard are unlimited, five-star hotel experiences. As an American, no one ever told me that there is such a thing as too much, but most folks seem to understand that if you eat all that’s being offered at the all-you-can-eat buffet, you’ll die. Similarly, if all your travel is exclusively super luxury, you will also die, but it would be more akin to a kind of psychic death — the type one might acquiesce to after drinking too much of their own, self-branded, farm-to-table, hand-crafted Kool-aid. I think it was Hamlet (or Batman) who  first described this condition as being, “hoisted by your own petard.”

In France, where my family and I live, children get two weeks off from school every six weeks. My wife and I have found that one of the best ways to avoid blowing ourselves up with that sweet, sweet Kool-aid is to take some of these trips with them. It’s impossible to take yourself too seriously when your party of five spills out of the rental car like the Beverly Hillbillies, disgorging a heap of debris and untidy teenagers. So in spring, we sampled a bit of what was on offer via a 12-day European road trip in a fully electric Volvo EC40.

Our first stop was the historic German spa town of Baden-Baden, a five-hour drive from Paris. After being in the car for nearly eight hours, we arrived at the Hotel Belle Epoque, a four-star, 20-room boutique hotel housed in a converted 19th century chateau. While we all really appreciated the property's lush outdoor space and meticulously appointed rooms (our kids shared an amazing suite under heavy, sharply angled eaves), we were mostly looking forward to experiencing Baden-Baden’s world-class, spring-fed spas. Since the teenagers seem incapable of expressing anything other than apathetic contempt, it’s hard to know how they felt. My wife and I, however, were not at all disappointed. 

After just one night, we were on the road again, heading towards Munich. We drove by way of the Black Forest, with a stop at the Black Forest Open Air Museum. This collection of farmhouses dating from the 17th century provided a good opportunity to create some space between ourselves and the children (I was also told to note here that the stop was necessary to charge the car). However, because I’m responsible for feeding them, my personal time was cut a bit short by the children's need to argue with me about how that works, assuring me that they’re never hungry because they ate that one time a week ago. The museum’s website guaranteed that I would get the opportunity to experience how people lived 600 years ago, but I was skeptical that anyone back then would have tolerated whatever it was that my children were now talking about. Fortunately, just minutes after placing our order with a sturdy young German server at the museum’s restaurant, a 17-kilo wooden platter arrived featuring a variety of local delicacies, including sausage (covered in mayo), boiled veal (covered in mayo), boiled potatoes and cauliflower (covered in mayo), and coleslaw, which is cabbage and mayo (also covered in mayo). My children loved it because they don’t know anything. My wife loved it because the bare utility of boiled meat (along with everything German) really appeals to her WASP-y sense of, “I don’t deserve anything good.” I loved it because I hate myself.

The road through the Black Forest was beautiful and winding. Then we hit Germany’s federal motorway, the Autobahn, which is famous for large stretches without speed limits. While our Volvo EC40 was completely at ease in that environment (read: fast), something about traveling with my children through traffic at 140 mph didn't feel quite right. Interestingly, this was one of the few moments on the trip that captured the collective imagination- everyone encouraging Dad to place the family’s lives in imminent danger, hoping to create a compelling and potentially viral piece of content for their respective social media profiles. 

The Rosewood Munich was a dream, one that included butler service, a spa (including an indoor pool), and formal afternoon tea. However, sadly my dream of being a gluttonous layabout (served by the butler, preferably poolside after a session at the spa) proved elusive due to the property’s central location. While that is likely to be preferable for most travelers (who are, you know, traveling), for me this meant that my more functional wife and our annoyingly motivated children insisted that I put my pants back on and, at least, take a (very short) walk to Marienplatz Square to see the Rathaus-Glockenspiel. Which I did. And it was lovely.

Our next stop was Salzburg, Austria. My wife puts together the best itineraries. Whenever I share whatever details of a trip I'm able to recall, people tend to say things like, 'Wow, that’s so interesting,’ or, ‘Me too, I love history.’ She does a great job of making me look like a hero. In Salzburg, we had lunch in what claims to be the oldest restaurant in not just the city but also the world: St Peter Stiftskulinarium. Located within St. Peter’s Abbey, it has been in continuous operation since 803 AD. Once inside, you’re transported back in time (minus all the dysentery and high infant mortality rates) to when people sat in cozy spaces, wrapped in dark wood, eating sweet, airy, souffle-meringue hybrids called Salzberger Nockerls. 

I like driving for a number of reasons, one of which is that it does not involve walking. Unfortunately, our next stop, Hotel Park in Bled, Slovenia, was situated on the gorgeous, spotless, clear, blue Lake Bled, which also featured a lovely walking path littered with old-timey ice-cream stands. The sun was shining, so we were expected to walk some more in order to “remain open to experiencing new things.”  I was then told that pushing myself “outside of your comfort zone” might not just be good for me but could also benefit those around me “if you are at all interested in thinking about anyone else other than yourself.” I did all those things and reluctantly enjoyed them, but was looking forward to sitting down some more in the car tomorrow. 

My 13 year old daughter started crying as I unplugged the car and started driving away from the hotel. Was she hungry again? Perhaps a bit road weary? Maybe she was going to miss the property’s amazing pool, or Tone and Pavia, the two robot servers at the hotel’s Park Cafe who brought her breakfast and insisted on, to her great amusement, singing happy birthday to her this morning in 19 different languages. As her gorgeous, wide blue eyes slowly filled with tears, she sadly explained that she would, “never again, like not ever again” have an opportunity to sample the famous Bled Cream Cake (Blejska kremšnita) that we had spent the morning discussing. She was right.

We were about six days in on this road trip and I was so tired … mostly of my children. Accounting for this, of course, was my wife, who had saved the best stays for last. And by the best, I mean they had kids’ clubs. Any parent knows that a kids’ club is the difference between a trip and a vacation. However, before we arrived at the second Rosewood property on this trip, the distance between Lake Bled and Tuscany demanded we stop for a night in Ferrara, Italy. 

This is one of the things I really love about electric cars. In a traditional, combustion-powered vehicle, the 392-mile drive between Bled and Tuscany would take (me) about seven and a half  hours. My last car, a 2011 Volvo XC90, got about 400 miles to a tank. This meant that I, on a comparable trip, could (and often did) stop only once for gas and food, powering through the rest of the drive like an amphetamine-crazed infantryman from the Second World War. But the need to charge an electric vehicle forces you to slow down. You have to stop, eat, and agree (yes, please) to that fourth double espresso.

 “Range anxiety” is a term that has been coined to acknowledge a real fear relative to the new technology. While I hate to admit it, our corporate overlords have once again captured the dread of a what it is to be an American human: If I get stuck and run out of X resource (in this case X = battery power), I’m on my own and totally fucked. (We always had more than enough battery to get from one charging station to another, by the way, the car calculating battery need and usage according to personal driving habits, road type, and elevation).

Ferrerra was lovely-ish. We ate dinner in the Piazza del Municipio, where the architecturally imposing structures surrounding the plaza created an echo chamber of laughter and play, reverberating the manic energy of children at play and their notably less spirited parents. But our dinner was ultimately overshadowed by the sketchy halfway house where we’d end up spending the night. The hotel seemed safe and the rooms were clean and so we signed the contracts and accepted the keys. But when we woke up the next morning, as we made our way to the ‘restaurant’ for ‘breakfast’, we, and by we I mean my children, came across the curious site of three fully grown, fully dressed men, piled in a heap on one, very shared, European sized double bed. “Came across” suggests that this scene may have been found somewhere out of the ordinary, but that was not the case. They were all just there, in the room at the end of the hallway. The only thing out of the ordinary was how completely open their door was, exposing their precarious but seemingly consensual sleeping arrangement. “Good for them,” I thought, relative to both that pile of men, and my kids. The hotels we get to stay in tend to offer the kids a skewed version of the world; and that stack of men offered a bit of a market correction. It also seemed clear that those men were getting the sleep they so desperately needed, and not a minute too soon.

The fanciest places allow you to be the laziest, so I was really looking forward to Rosewood Castiglion del Bosco. Formerly owned by the Ferragamo family, it is located on a 900-year-old, 5000-acre UNESCO World Heritage Site. The hotel’s 153-acre vineyard (where the grapes are hand-harvested annually and barrel-aged) was apparently what prompted the family to buy the land. One of its two restaurants (Ristorante Campo Del Drago) is Michelin starred with all of the dishes utilizing ingredients harvested locally and/or onsite. The property features Italy’s only private golf course, which was designed by someone who really means something in that world and is meant to highlight the region’s green, naturally rolling hills (I don’t know anything about golf). We were housed in Villa Biondi, the property’s largest villa, a gorgeous, 7800 square foot, five bed, six full (and two half) bath affair, that was fully staffed, catered, and came with the keys to a 2024 Land Rover Defender so that we could effortlessly shuttle ourselves between it and wherever we thought we may need to go. It may be the nicest place I’ve ever stayed. None of this, however, could hold a candle to the hotel’s wildly robust, onsite kids’ programming guaranteeing that, from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, I would actually get to enjoy it. 

With a gap between our last two stays, we — and by we, I mean my wife — organized a Home Exchange in Lake Como. For those of you not familiar with the platform, Home Exchange is a game changer, especially if you’re traveling as a family. For a small membership fee, you have access to a network of 150,000 screened and verified members in 145 different countries — all of whom are interested in staying in your totally normal (if not slightly small and untidy) home, as long as that normal (and perhaps a little dated, I mean, would it kill you to replace the $30 shower head…) home is located in a place that other people want to visit. It’s a lovely way to experience a destination. Some claim that one of the downsides to staying at these luxury properties is that you're staying in a bubble, and I agree. It is a bubble, a warm, delicious bubble that no one in their right mind would ever be interested in ever leaving, ever, but a bubble nonetheless that does indeed keep you from fully experiencing the everyday life of a place: its food, or its supermarkets for example. Mostly I don’t care. A meticulously curated reality, rife with massage therapists, eucalyptus saturated spas and personal trainers… sure, the supermarket sounds great, where can I find the Italian Oreos? 

We left Lake Como, and were approaching the tail end of our trip, but fortunately not before my family and I got to bathe, swim, and use a bidet piped with Evian water. The Hotel Royal at Evian Resort is without question, breathtaking. Overlooking Lake Geneva and, beyond that, the Alps, it’s situated on 47-acres of LPO-certified grounds and feels as massive as it is. Restored frescoes by Gustave Jaulmes adorn the ceilings of the Michelin-starred Les Fresques restaurant, and hotel guests have included everyone from Marcel Proust to Ray Charles. But where the place really manages to thread the needle is in its ability to create warmth amidst all the grandeur. Kids and parents walked the halls in the hotel’s branded slippers and lush hooded robes, shuttled quietly in dedicated elevators from their rooms to the spa, which features 22 private treatment rooms. There was an unexpected lightness about the place which, after all of the hotels and all of the driving and all of the smells (of our children), was very welcome. But the real piece de resistance, the showstopper (defined as something so good that it stops the progress of something, in this case, the invasion of my psyche by my young people's vapidity) was the 10,000-square-foot kids' club, which included programming for teens that ran until midnight. 

As I drove the Volvo EC40 back to Paris, I considered our journey. What, if anything, had I learned?  Well, I didn’t know that men could fall asleep that way or that I could so maniacally, simultaneously, love and loathe my kids, vacillating back and forth between the two poles so rapidly, it often created a sort of psychic disconnect between reality and dream states. I had never considered the idea of taking more time on the road to enjoy, rather than simply complete, a road trip. I also didn’t realize that Evian had a source that you could drink from and bidet with. And who knew that Mozart was from Salzburg or that people ate real food in 803 AD, nevermind sat in restaurants using silverware (sticks, I would have suggested). I didn’t really love traveling like this with my kids. Not because they're my kids but because they’re not particularly interesting, or nice. But I can’t imagine they were all that thrilled about spending this much time with me either. Why would they be? I was an embittered old coot, wholly committed to taking the wind out of their youthful sails by yelling nonsensical statements like, “Pipe down back there,”  in their direction. But ultimately, I realized that six hotels in 12 days is probably too many when you're traveling with this many little people, even when you love them as desperately as I do.