Posts Tagged ‘planning’

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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We just finished another 22 hour bus ride, so I thought I’d post this.  I wrote it a little while ago, but wanted to get it up to document our planning process and how the trip will go!

When we started to plan our trip we looked at all kinds of options for getting ourselves around the world.  From our reseach it seemed to us that most people doing this type of trip do one of two major options.

Option 1:  Buy your flights as you go.  This provides a lot of flexibility since nothing or at least not everything is booked up front.  You also can shop for cheap flights as you go and try to save money that way.

Option 2:  Buy a Round the World ticket from one of the major airline alliances.  This has the advantage of the price being set upfront, you have dates and flights set before you leave home, and there’s usually at least some measure of flexibility built in, although you may have to pay to change some things on the fly.

We went with option 2.  After checking around we decided to buy our ticket here: Oneworld Alliance.  We liked their planner and found that we could get the kind of trip we wanted this way.  Even if you aren’t setting off around the world it’s fun to play with their planner and see all the places you can go!!!  Oneworld Planner

Our Itinerary: