How Did I Do #lukeurope? - Planning/Transportation

A collage of my favorite photos from every European place I spent at least one night in over the last two months.

I'm back. I wish I could say that I am sorry that I did not update this blog while I was on the road, but the truth is, I was far too busy enjoying the experience to do any real writing about it, aside from journal entries as I was in transit between cities. Chances are, if you are reading this, you have already been privy to a veritable flood of #lukeurope pictures and stories via Twitter, Instagram, and/or Facebook, anyway.

Along the journey, I probably had at least a dozen people write to me, either publicly or privately, and ask just how I managed to pull the trip together. Now that I am home, I wanted to write a sort of "how to" guide, if anyone is interested in the sort of trip that I did, especially because I was the beneficiary of so much help in putting it together myself. I have plenty of thoughts and tips, so I will split up the blog posts in order to provide some brevity among them. It is possible that only one or two topics will be of interest to a particular reader, in any case.

I will start with how I began the trip: planning where to do and thinking about the various transportation options available for how to get there.

PLANNING

1) I constructed a list of places that I wanted to see. I wrote in the preliminary #lukeurope post that I intentionally chose European cities that I had not previously been to. This was actually one of the most difficult aspects of the entire trip: merely choosing where to go (and in what order) out of the many options available.

To do this, I used a good old fashioned paper map and connecting the dots. Eurail (I'll get to that in a bit) sent me one as a part of the train pass packet I received. Here's a link to the site to download a pdf (it is enormous) and see travel times by train: Eurail.com - Railway Map.

As far as selecting cities to go to, here is what I would say - go with what interests you. I do not think that many people do Prague --> Auschwitz --> Vienna in the course of 24 hours, but I felt that it was crucial for me as a history teacher to go. It would be impossible to rank the places on the trip in order of preference, but I will say that London and Paris absolutely demand at least three nights. London is the greatest city in the world. Paris has an abundance of fantastic places to visit and food to eat.

I will consider this blog post a failure if you haven't been to London before and you don't go if you are in Europe.

I knew that I wanted to be in London twice: once for a week of soccer games in May, and again for Wimbledon in July. Those were the real bookends of the trip. I also knew that I wanted to be in Paris after London, because of the French Open tennis tournament being played. Other than that, I was open. If you are planning your own trip, I would advise researching major events that are happening in cities you might want to travel to. For me, it was sports and concerts that led me to a framework.

2) Once you have the general place framework in place, start assigning dates for how long you might stay, based on research. You might feel the need to really soak in a city. For me, I mostly wanted to get a brief taste by doing as much as I possibly could in a short amount of time (a staple of my traveling style). I asked for a little feedback from my European friends about duration of stays, but mostly, I made my mind up myself. It went just about perfectly - each city I felt like I had just about exactly the right amount of time in. 

A recap: 

London - A combined three weeks. Only feasible due to the graciousness of my relatives and friends, though. I could easily live in London and never get tired of it (which is what I did in 2007, while I was studying abroad in the summer)

Paris - 6 nights (needed for the French Open semifinals and finals, but totally loved every second there)

Madrid - 2 nights (the best part about Madrid are the nights, by far)

Barcelona - 2 nights

Berlin - 2 nights

Prague - 1 night (Prague is a very compact city and easy to walk around)

Krakow/Auschwitz - 0 nights (I took an overnight train on both ends of that day)

Vienna - 2 nights (I barely fit everything I wanted to do in that time)

Budapest - 1 night (ditto)

Bucharest - 1 night (I would not recommend Bucharest as a destination, unless you really want good, cheap food, or you are on the train/bus to Istanbul, which I wouldn't recommend either - flying is almost certainly a better option, even if it is a bit more expensive)

Istanbul - 3 nights

Iceland - 1 night by the airport on the way over, 3 nights in Reykjavik on the way back (I think 2 easily could have been enough) 

I heartily enjoyed the Blue Lagoon in Iceland on the trip over to Europe. Super touristy places can be quite fun if you approach them in the right way.

3) Once I had the dates of the cities roughly planned (see the "transportation" section below for how I accomplished that), I utilized some crowd sourcing among my friends to see what might be good ideas to do there. I created a Google Doc (sign up for a free Google account and use Google Drive to create the document to share and edit) with my potential itinerary and blasted it out on Facebook and Twitter to my friends - and more specifically, my friends in the Olympic ticket hunting group the 2012Tweeps (the majority of whom live in the UK and have traveled around Europe before). Here's the link to view what that process looked like for me: Google Docs - #lukeurope Eurail Itinerary. 

Asking others for help in planning (and really, throughout the journey) was so crucial. I would have had to totally wing it in each city if I had not had a rough plan in mind. Seeing as I was trying to make the most of every minute, I am confident I would have missed out on many of the great places that were off the beaten path. You never know which seemingly random long-lost Facebook friend might pop up to say that they studied abroad in a city on your list, or has a relative in the area, or visited themselves and have a few ideas on what to do. I also had a few of these types of interactions on the trip, as I was saying where I was next off to and friends who had previously missed my posts suddenly became quite interested and wanted to give me advice.

4) After the input of my friends, I started actually booking the transportation and solidifying the itinerary. This way, I was able to hear different opinions on how much time I needed in each area. I ended up going forward with my original dates and cities, but it was great to get feedback about the feasibility of what I was attempting to do.

Does the prospect of a hot and humid night without air conditioning on one of these train cabin beds appeal to you? If so, Europe is the place for you! ;-)

TRANSPORTATION

This went hand in hand with the planning of the trip. I could not have nailed down the dates for the cities I wanted to visit without knowing how I was going to get there and then get around.

Getting To Europe: Ahh, yes. I do realize that not everyone is fortunate enough to have free flight vouchers from Icelandair. However, getting to Europe cheaply is not too hard. With a bevy of airline options available from the US, putting in the time to study and create a flight itinerary helps immensely with saving money. Here are some tips:

1) Compare your options for buying the flights. Kayak.com has an interesting search tool called Explore, where you can see prices from a city (like Portland) to all major cities in Europe during a specific season. Kayak.com/Explore

Of course, the regular search function on Kayak.com is a good one for pricing out initial options.

2) If you have time, consider the possibility of building up airline miles. For some reason, many people completely discount this as an option. "But, I've never really done much flying - I don't have many miles to spend." This logic quickly disappears when you look at the countless options for earning miles on the ground.

An immensely helpful website is FreeFrequentFlyerMiles.com.

For instance (I am NOT telling you to do this - everyone has their own credit situation and applying for a credit card is a decision that really requires careful evaluation, outside of just the rewards aspect), I earned 40,000 points/miles that I could use on British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, or United Airlines to get to Europe and back for just the price of taxes, simply by applying for a Chase Sapphire Preferred Card and spending $3,000 in two months on it. I needed it for the no foreign transaction fees element, anyway.

Essentially, I have a free round trip flight to Europe now, just for spending as I normally would and putting everything on the Chase card. A good way to increase your charging to the card is by asking friends or family members if you can pay with your card for dinner (or really, any large charge) and then have them reimburse you when the statement comes (or cash at the time)

Soaring between continents is one of my favorite experiences in life.

I always pay my credit card balance off in full every month and I am careful to never exceed my credit limit, so having a credit card that is linked to an airline mileage account (I have three now - the Chase Sapphire Preferred card, the Alaska Airlines Visa, and the jetBlue American Express) is an easy way to build up miles.

Of course, there are tons of other ways to earn miles. Credit cards offer the most bang for the buck, but even for someone that does not have that as an option available can find other ways to slowly but surely build up miles.

I have most of my frequent flyer miles with Alaska Airlines, simply because they have a ton of great international partners and are Portland's largest airline. If you are interested, you can look around and see how much a flight to Europe might cost in Alaska Airlines miles, using their GREAT fare calendar (make sure to check the "award calendar" box). I just looked at this myself, and if I had a little flexibility, I could easily redeem 40,000 miles and about $217 for taxes for round trip flights from Portland to London Heathrow, just about any time.

3) If you are REALLY interested in finding super low fares and getting into the frequent flyer programs, the FlyerTalk forums are essential reading.

Transport Between European Cities: I probably could have used more time to make my transportation plan, to be honest. What happened was that Eurail.com was running a promotion that entailed buying a "Global Pass" (in quotes, because it did not cover the United Kingdom or Poland - you can also buy country or region specific passes, if you know you just want to travel around a few countries, not the entire continent) and receiving two "extra" days for free. Instead of 15 days continuous, I purchased 15+2 for the same price. 

If you are traveling with someone else, you can buy two passes and get a discount (you will have to travel everywhere together on the passes - it does not allow for independent travel). Additionally, if you are aged 25 or under, you are eligible for a decidedly cheaper version of the pass. When I purchased mine, I was 26 and about 8 months, haha. A year too late to save $270!

PLEASE NOTE: Buying a Eurail pass does NOT mean that you are done with transport expenses, even on trains. Every train I took had a mandatory seat reservation fee, as well - which were as steep as about $83 in one case (Paris to Madrid). If you want to see how much seat reservation fees might be for your routes (this website also a great tool for looking out the departure and arrival times of various train options), check out RailEurope.com - Get Train Tickets & Rail Passes.

The reason I purchased the Global Pass was because I was still in the midst of teaching and frankly, did not have the time to put into 1) planning where I wanted to go, 2) pricing out how much the train fares and seat reservations would have been without the pass, 3) waiting until the "two free days" offer expired. So I purchased it with about two hours left in the offer period.

My Eurail Global Pass (at top) and various ticket/seat reservations.

In hindsight, I might have fared better (well, at least monetarily) by waiting and really comparing the full costs of the various options available to travelers around Europe. The major ones (as I see them) are:

Flights

Due to the shorter distances and abundance of low cost carriers, flights in Europe seemed to be less expensive than those in the US. To compare prices and days, I always like to use www.kayak.com. I took European internal flights from Barcelona to Berlin and Istanbul to London, which worked out really well in combination with my Eurail pass.

Trains

Option 1) Buy a Eurail Pass and then plan out the itinerary and book seat reservations (extra fees).

Option 2) Buy individual train fares (with seat reservations). Probably a better option if you are only seeing 3-4 cities that are within one train route of each other. Do your research, though!

Buses

There are a variety of bus options available (think like the East Coast of the US, if you have ever used BoltBus or MegaBus), but I never really considered them, due to the time involved in transport. If you have more time available, or really need to save on costs, looking into buses might be a good option.

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If you opt (like me) for the Eurail pass route, here are a few more tips:

1) Spend a good deal of time reading The Man in Seat 61 on what it is going to entail, like needing to validate the pass at a station on your first day of travel.

2) Again, look up potential trains departures and seat reservation fees using RailEurope.

3) Write down a few options that might work. I typed out a list (that is still visible in the Google Doc I posted to my friends). It came in VERY handy when I proceeded to...

4) Call RailEurope and book the seat reservations (this is the very last step in the planning/transportation stage). I mean, you could theoretically bypass this by just waiting at various ticket counters along the way and paying for seat reservations, etc. To me, that would have been a HUGE time waster - I understand the desire for spontaneity on trips, but having the seats booked in advance was incredibly helpful. Calling them up and paying the (I think it was $25) fee to book everything, have my seats reserved, then immediately ship me the physical tickets via UPS (again, another fee, but still) was SO worth it. 

If I recall correctly, it is a bit difficult/a wait to get a live person on the phone (they have a system where they call you back once someone is available), but such a lifesaver. I literally booked my ENTIRE Eurail trip, including the aspects that were outside the pass in Poland, in one phone call. The woman was super patient and appreciated that I had my train times and numbers already down, for the most part. The number in the US is 1-800-622-8600.

London's St. Pancras International Rail Station - a terminal for the Eurostar, as well as a link to the London Underground metro system.

Inner City Transport: I found that almost universally, major European train stations in cities are centrally located and connected to public transportation. What really helped me out was downloading a .pdf file of the subway network for each city to my iPhone - simply go to Google and search for "_____ metro map pdf" or something similar, tap on the link, then choose "Open in iBooks" at the top when it loads. Presto - you now have a saved file for reference whenever you want it. Obviously, you could do the same thing with an iPod Touch or iPad, and I am sure there are other ways of procuring a map before you arrive if you have another type of mobile device. If all else fails, just print a metro map out before you go, or take a picture of one once you arrive in a city.

I also learned quickly that I could get just about everywhere I wanted to in most cities by walking. Again, having an iPhone (even if you do not have a data roaming plan - I will get to that in another post) was SO handy in being able to see where I was on a map and look at where I needed to go. This way, I avoided most of the troublesome bus systems (which can get confusing very quickly) and found my way easily to the major sights and metro links.

Every hotel/hostel/etc that I stayed at had printed out city street maps, ready for handing out for free. I always asked for one and kept it in a pocket while I was out and about. Usually, they note major attractions, and sometimes, asking the person at the front desk about what to do/where to eat yielded some really great results.

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For now, that is all I have on the topic. Did I miss anything regarding planning (the basics - I will get to accommodations and sights in another post) or transportation that would be helpful to know? Please let me know if this was at all useful! I will try to have the next post in the "how to" series up soon. Thank you for reading!