Europe Vacation 2011 Part 1

As per request from a reader, I'm finally writing about our first big trip together, Europe. I'm not sure why I didn't write about it sooner, but nonetheless here it goes. Luckily I kept a detailed journal and all the maps, papers from when we traveled, so I should be pretty current on all the minor details.

Preparations

 I'll begin by saying that a lot of planning and money went into this trip, so if at times while you're reading this you seem overwhelmed with the amount of planning we did, well we were a tad overwhelmed too. We planned it all out as to save us the most money and get the most out of this trip. We were on a budget being freshly graduated from college and living with my husband's parents, so we wanted to take advantage of the cheapest shortcuts possible. That means, LOTS of planning ahead of time.

First, First things first, buy Rick Steves guidebooks for whatever European country you want to visit. This made our lives 100% easier. We got this suggestion from my SIL's cousin after I stalked her fb pics for weeks looking at their Eurotrip pics. These books gave suggestions on everything from hostels, eateries, how to get around the city, to tours and historical tidbits. Amazing books.

First things first, we booked our flight round trip out of (CDG) Paris, France. We stalked the internet until the prices dropped right under $1000 and we snatched them. I still remember the day I booked them. I was baby sitting our best friend's son, Jaxon and checked Kayak, realized our tickets had finally dropped to an affordable price. Made the call to Kit and booked it. Then it became real. He was very hesitant to go on this trip. Not because he didn't want to, but that we were living with his parents and didn't really have jobs yet. Hard to justify spending a lot of money on a trip when you're homeless, jobless and living with mom and dad. We had a talk with Kit's parents about what we were thinking and they were amazing. They told us to go. They knew we had the money saved and time since the AF put our activation on hold, and didn't want us to think twice or miss out on a trip of a lifetime. That's all we needed to hear. I'll never be able to thank them enough for that.

Second, was booking train passes/reservations. This is the most tricky part. We traveled during the prime tourism season (June) so we read that we needed to reserve train passes/reservations ahead of time or else we could miss out and that wouldn't be good. First we booked through RailEurope, www.raileurope.com . We first chose the Eurail Select Pass 3 Countries pass. This gave us the freedom to pass freely via rail through 3 countries of our choosing. You have to select these countries ahead of time for this specific pass, we chose France, Italy and Switzerland and it was only valid for 6 days (don't have to be consecutive) and used within 2 months. See, tricky? Now the kicker is...to guarantee a seat on a train you need a reservation ticket, separate from your pass. The pass can get you on the train, no problem if there are empty seats BUT if they're all reserved then you'll have to wait for the next available train which could take days during prime season. So on top of the passes we also paid an extra $20/person/train average to reserve our seats. This meant we had to research the length of the train trips, where the stations were and what times we needed. This was indeed the most time consuming part. To accomplish this we needed an idea of the tours we wanted to do in each city so that we could plan our travels around it. We booked our hostels either within walking distance of the train stations or near a subway to take us to the train stations. See, lots of planning!

Third, book our boarding. We decided to stay in hostels for a couple reasons, #1 - They're Cheap! #2 - it's part of the experience of being in Europe and looking back on it, it was an excellent decision. We met great people from all over the world, had good experiences and fully embraced the backpacking experience. We used hostelworld.com and Rick Steves suggestions to choose our hostels. We strategically chose locations that we could walk to our main sites/tours to or that were close to a metro station that we could then get to our tours/sites fairly easily. When you book a hostel, you reserve by bed, not room. We stayed in rooms of 6 or 8 beds because the more people in a room the cheaper the bed price was. We chose mixed sex rooms so that we could occupy the same bunk bed. He always took bottom because he thought I'd get snatched if I were on bottom, silly boy. We were sure to check the reviews to see if past travelers had bad experiences with theft or what have you. Some hostels provide sheets, some don't, some provide lockers to lock up your stuff. Research this before hand so that you can pack appropriately. All the hostels we chose provided a pillow and wool blanket so we packed our own sheets/pillowcases and we brought bicycle locks for our packs to chain to the beds while we were out and about (also pack small locks for zippers for the nosy bunk mate). Also research the check in times and if they have curfews, meaning some lock their doors at 10p and if you aren't inside before then then you aren't coming in. Bathrooms are usually set up one per room. So if you sleep in a room of 8 then realize 8 boys/girls are sharing one bathroom/shower.

Since we read that taxis over there were pretty expensive we were determined to only use the metro, buses (local transportation) and our own two feet. Due to all of our awesome planning we only had to use a cab once. Very proud of us and all the money we saved from that alone.

Fourth, book any tours we needed to reserve in advance! The only tour we needed to book before hand was the Band of Brothers tour we took in Normandy France on DDay for obvious reasons, pretty popular on that day. We also researched what museums were open on what day/times so what we didn't get up to the Louvre on a Tuesday and realize they're closed.

So as you can see, a trip like this can require lots of preparation but we realized with each reservation we made it just made us more excited. We were making it happen. We were doing it. No going back!

Next. part 2 for details on our trip experience!