laratheescapeartist

In August we went on a road trip from Brussels to Basel in Switzerland, Galtür in Austria, Lake Constance in Germany and finally Metz in France then home to Brussels. The longest part of our trip was the 7 nights we spent at Ballunspitze Kinderhotel in Galtür, which was amazing, I felt genuinely relaxed after our stay there (which never happens on family holidays), and then our car broke down 45 minutes into our homeward journey, and I haven’t felt relaxed since!

It’s difficult to do a like-for-like comparison as you just can’t fly from Brussels to Galtür (the nearest airport is Innsbruck but there are no direct flights to there from Brussels), and you obviously can’t stop places enroute if you fly so it would have been a very different kind of holiday, but the distance between them is about 850km, so that’s 1700km for the round trip. I’ll assume we drove more like 1800km with additional little trips to visit places. Our 2019 Touran has CO2 emissions of ~125g/km (which yes is VW supplied data so is going to be lower than it actually is), which gives us a total transport carbon footprint for our holiday of 225kg or 0.23 tonnes. If we were to have done a typical summer holiday and all 4 of us had flown to Athens instead, that would have had emissions of more like 2.62 tonnes – TEN TIMES HIGHER (according to the World land trust carbon calculator). it really is worth it to cut out the flights, it makes a massive difference. Hoping next year we can go by train and get even lower!