THE PLANNING PHASE
Beyond the excitement of traveling lies the immense planning phase. Sure, you can “wing” some of it, but the more you plan the smoother your trip will go. Things will come up regardless of your extensive planning, that is why we chose to spend the year planning as much as possible to avoid those unwanted mishaps as much as we could.
Once we planned out where we were going, in what order, and made the flight reservations, we started researching places to stay. Trip Advisor is a good tool. You have access to a wide range of Bed & Breakfasts, Hotels, etc. which you can see pictures, reviews, accommodations, and pricing. We made reservations as soon as we knew where we were going to be staying. Some places fill up quicker than others and you also have more options the sooner you make reservations. Some places we chose were frugal and some were more extravagant. We didn’t want to spend a lot of money on every place we stayed because we weren’t going to be spending a lot of time in the rooms. We’d rather be out hiking and sightseeing. By the time we were done each day, we really only cared that it had a shower, toilet and beds. I recommend that you leave a copy of your itinerary with someone back home so you can be contacted in case of an emergency. Especially, if someone is looking after your animals or home.
A great way to travel from town to town or country to country is via the Eurail. Order the Eurail Pass in advance and you can use their schedule to help you plan your route since you’ll have the days and times the trains run. On a side note, if you’re traveling around London, take a Black Cab. We thought it would be so cool to hire a “driver” to meet us at the airport, we wouldn’t have to wait, and surely they would know how to get us from Heathrow Airport to Gatwick Airport quickly and easily. After all, they’re professionals and we’ll get special treatment. NOT! Our driver had us walking up and down the aisles in the airport parking lot for 30 minutes because he lost his car. I think that falls under the “Professional Driver 101 class”. Take note of what section you park in. He left us so he could make a phone call and we didn’t think he was coming back. He finally found the car, drove like a bat out of hell weaving in and out of traffic and still couldn’t quite get us to the airport. He dropped us off about 3/4 of a mile away from Gatwick and we had to schlep all our luggage across a rugged field running all while trying not to have an asthma attack. Thankfully, when we couldn’t quite figure out how to get in to the airport, a Black Cab picked us up and took us where we needed to be just in the nick of time. He also didn’t even charge us because of what we had been through.
Don’t forget to notify your charge card companies that you’ll be traveling. They can flag your accounts indicating where you’ll be traveling and the dates you’ll be gone. You don’t want to go make a purchase and have the account frozen for suspicious activity. Also, take a couple different credit cards for those places that take one kind of card but not the other, i.e., Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover and pick cards that have no foreign transaction fees. I highly recommend checking out Rick Steves’ website for some very insightful information and tips. We picked up a couple of ideas that we hadn’t even thought about.
Now, we’re photo fanatics. I’m certainly no professional but I enjoy it. We went down and bought a bunch of SD cards for the cameras, bunches of camera batteries, several battery chargers and a couple of European electrical outlet converters. Since we were out all day, every day taking pictures of everything we saw, we each went through many batteries each day. Not only are we fanatics, we’re very competitive. The last thing we wanted, was to run out of batteries and have someone else get the “shot of the day”. It happened once. Fortunately, my main competitor was a better person than I and loaned me her camera for some shots.