Posts Tagged ‘Luxembourg’

Because of the stress we encountered upon entering Europe, we decided to remedy our poor planning as soon as possible and reserve 1 week or more of our upcoming accomodation and transportation.  Of course, nothing is that simple – our hotel, being the cheapest in Luxembourg, did not have internet available (but, interestingly, it did have an ashtray in the shared bathroom), so we went on a quest to find some cheap or free wifi in town.  This also afforded us a chance to sightsee along the way into town!

Valley and Bridge

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I haven’t been looking forward to writing this post.  To be honest, we hit a pretty low point in our trip and it threw both of us for pretty ugly loops.  I don’t want to dwell on it, but I think there are some traveling lessons to be learned, and we’ve had to adjust recently.  We got very accustomed to being able to plan a day or two ahead of time and just show up places and have things work out.  This is not the way that Europe works.  Especially in the summer.  Especially if you’re trying to save money.

We discovered this in a dramatic fashion.  The night before we left London I booked us a bus from London to Paris (which is really kind of cool – they put the bus on a train and take the train through the chunnel!) and then started trying to look for a place to stay.  It was late and we may have had a drink or two with our friends and we just wanted to go to sleep since we had to get up early for our bus.  But we couldn’t find a single hotel or hostel online in Paris for the next night for less than 200 Euros.  Total panic ensued.  And we still didn’t have a place to stay when we left the next morning.  We also didn’t have our bus ticket printed, but that was easily solved with an internet cafe across the street from London Victoria Coach Station.

By the time we got to Paris in the evening we were worried, tired, stressed out and figured we had two choices.  We could jump right into our Eurail pass and take a train to somewhere smaller where we thought we could get cheaper accommodation, or we could wander the streets of Paris fairly randomly until we found a place to stay.  We flipped through the train timetable (which we have since become very well acquainted with) and picked Strasbourg since we wanted very much to go there and there was a train leaving soon and it was only a two hour trip by TGV.

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