thanks for the updates. Sounds like he’s doing alright.
Go, Dweezil!! Yay!! Hope he’s enjoying every second of it!
Thanks for keeping us informed, Mama. We’re rooting for him! We’ve lived in Budapest and now in London and LOVE Europe and are always happy when others discover it.
You must be so proud! He’s doing something most non-autistics never do. Good for him!!
Am I reading it correctly when I see someone saying you can’t apply for a US Passport without having already booked a trip somewhere?
That seems odd if true, and certainly very different to the Australian/NZ experience.
No, it’s not correct. I think what they’re saying is you can’t get one in the space of 24 hrs in an emergency without showing need for one. Otherwise it would be chaos.
I don’t know if it would help or not if your passport gets stolen overseas but I also get a passport card when I renew my passport. It’s only good for land entry into the US but it makes a nice form of ID to carry separately.
Right, most of us get a passport, the normal, slow way, by sending a printed application, with the photos, fees and so forth to the national processing office in Philadelphia. (I think the office used to be in New Hampshire.) You can of course request a passport without having any specific travel plans, and that’s how some (most?) people do it.
Great tip - thanks!
We’re getting over the “scared out of our wits” and moving towards “proud and inspired”. 
He updated his status and posted more pictures. Including a selfie, so we know he hasn’t starved to death in 96 hours. 
Now Mama Zappa and I want to go to Europe and train around. We even have people we could visit.
Great point about Dweezil “doing something most non-autistics never do.” In his mid-teens he asked for permission to take Metro to downtown DC. We let him. I realized that by doing that he had more freedom of movement than his neurotypical peers.
I think that’s specifically to get expedited service. When I got my son his passport he had no travel planned, so there was no hurry. When i got my passport I had no plans on using it, I just wanted to have one.
Thanks; I was confused by this talk of travel plans being needed for a passport and I was thinking “I’ve never heard of it being done like that”; glad to hear that’s not the situation for the average person applying for a passport because they’re useful things to have.
What have you taught us today?
Let your children educate you. They know stuff intuitively that you have never even imagined.
And, they don’t know what they can’t do, so they go ahead and do it :D.
(my daughter taught me that when she made puff pastry, something I’d looked at and decided was too tough to bother with at home).
Most recently, he finally made it to Galati as of some time yesterday. I think his biggest impediment has been that he’d calculated train schedules assuming:
- No delays
- The trips would be easy to book.
He had such trouble trying to book a train to/from Zurich, because of their web site, that he gave up on it. Certainly his first chunk (London to Paris, Paris to Milan) didn’t work out due to train scheduling.
So, so far he’s spent full 24 hours or more in each of Paris, Munich and Budapest (not planned for this part of the trip). I just hope he got out and saw stuff while in each of the places.
I hope this morning he was on the 9 oclock bus to Chisinau, to stay at the Funky Mamaliga hostel. Moldova is a lovely place, and hostels are great, friendly places where he can meet a lot of other travelers. (Funky is a part of the name of the hostel.) Glad to hear that he is already well off the beaten track.
Dweezil’s procrastination is more the “It’ll be fine, Mom” type, rather than any result of his autism. Just normal 22-year-old who’s never yet been seriously inconvenienced by it stuff. It’s a very serious problem for this generation, because MOST things can be resolved so quickly now. They seldom have to plan anything weeks in advance, and getting the college classes they want is the first such shock for most of them.
They can’t comprehend missing a wedding because you didn’t buy plane tickets two months before it.
The epipen is an “abundance of caution” thing for him. I don’t think he’s ever had an ER trip for allergies. He just gets sick from them.
I have to say I’m really impressed by how flexible he’s been. His cramped schedule was certain to end in missed connections, and when it did, I was worried that his autism would show in the difficulty with changing the plan. But no, he just researched what was still possible and adjusted accordingly. 
As I keep telling MZ and TK, Dweezil is going to be fine. Its them I’m worried about.
I never thought the scheduling was a problem because it was always a rambling kind of trip anyway. If he loses time because of bad planning that’s not really a problem until the return flight.
The thing that would concern me is the ability to read people while traveling alone. It’s been going well so far. Shouldn’t expect that to change. The ops certainly know their offspring better than strangers. I kinda wish they asked much earlier for advise just to see what others came up with. Who doesn’t like to travel.
Semi-update: He hasn’t posted anything to Facebook or communicated with us at all since the 10th.
However due to the magic of cyberstalking, I know he - or at least his iphone - was on a train from Bucharest to Budapest last night (in fact I spotted the phone in two different places in western Romania. And I know he’s in a hostel in Budapest tonight.
He needs to be back in London very early on the 20th to catch his noon flight from Heathrow. Hopefully he has the sense to head back to London the day before, given the train scheduling issues he’s had so far - I’ve even got a free place for him not too far from Heathrow.
Galati, his main destination, looks run down - presumably that’s an artifact of where he happened to go, but a lot of places look like they’re fresh from being a war zone. And there’s a LOT of graffiti on the monuments he snapped photos of. Supposedly there are some lovely scenic places to visit as well, I mean it’s right on the Danube. But I have no evidence he saw those.
I’ve been lurking in this thread with a certain degree of curiosity and concern, and I must say, Mama Zappa, that you’re remarkably sanguine about what most people would consider a rather stressful and worrying experience. I’m glad he (or at least his phone…) appears to be okay and getting around, but I must admit I wouldn’t be able to cope with a 4-day gap in communication in similar circumstances. I don’t even have children and I’m stressed by this!
What happens - please indulge me in my concern here - if he doesn’t make it back to London by the 20th? Does he have the money and ability to book a new flight, or reschedule his existing one?
I think once he got to Paris, we worried less because at that point he’d proven he could get through Customs, through a strange city to the train, and through another country with a different language. (for me personally that tipping point would have been Munich, as I speak French, but Dweezil doesn’t speak anything but English and high-school Spanish). If he (or his phone) had shown up somewhere wildly different from the places he planned to visit, I’d have worried more, but when I saw Munich I was just puzzled (as it was on his itinerary, just not at that time).
If he doesn’t make it back by the 20th, well, what he’ll have to do is throw himself on the mercy of the airline and hope they can book him on another flight in standby mode. If there’s an extra charge, he’ll have to log on, pay down his credit card, and pay for it himself. He should have plenty of money - he works at a grocery store so he’s not raking in the big bucks, on the other hand he doesn’t spend much either so…
At least he knows the train routes from Budapest back to London - dunno how often Budapest-to-Munich or Munich-to-Paris trains run but presumably he could get back to Paris in 24-36 hours from where he is, and of course the trains to London run several times a day.
So you lost contact with him while he was taking an overnight train through the Carpathian mountains? I’d have some garlic and holy symbols ready when picking him up at the airport.
Oh dear.
He’s on the way to a cousin’s apartment in Paris right now. I’ll feel just awful if something happens. Wait - French cuisine uses garlic, right? And she may be Catholic enough to have a crucifix handy, so…
My friend in London tomorrow night, now… may just be out of luck.