5/17/13 11:45 PM CST
Welcome to our blog! The purpose is
to keep family and friends up to date with our gallivanting, journal about this
trip, and educate anyone who looks to travel to Europe on a tight budget (or
any budget :P) in the future.
Today
we arrived at O’hare at 3PM for our 5:25 flight to Warsaw… after waiting in the
longest line ever to check in, we realized that our flight was delayed by
almost an hour and a half! So there’s a really good chance we’ll miss our
connection to Barcelona and have to stay in Warsaw for a night…
Here’s
a little bit of backstory: We’re 23 and 24 and spending about 23 full days in
Europe with backpacks that weigh less than 16lbs with all our things in them.
As I type this, I’m watching the sun come up in the horizon; the Europe sun is
greeting us! The whole idea of the trip started a year ago when we bought Rick
Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door 2012
because I (Becca) had a friend recommend it to me years ago. The book is an
inspiration and makes trekking through Europe with almost no luggage seem easy!
Soon after we carefully mapped out our rather ambitious plan to see Dublin,
Barcelona, Lucern, Zurich, Munich, Venice, Vienna, Amsterdam and Oslo in 31
days. Convinced this was feasible in our $5500 budget, we went to a travel
agent in Naperville who took one look at our itinerary and thought we were
crazy. Still, we thought it was
manageable.
In
truth… it IS manageable, but around the beginning of spring semester (my last
semester for my bachelors) we agreed to downscale the time frame, budget, and
cities and stick to mainland Europe. The final itinerary for our adventure, in
order, is Barcelona, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Lucern, Zurich, Munich,
Salzberg and Vienna. It’s still
ambitious… but much more doable! We booked an “open-jaw” flight through a
travel agent from Chicago to Barcelona and then Vienna back to Chicago for
$1200 each. Because Andy was so busy this semester… I did 100% of the rest of
the booking for the trip. Here’s what I have learned:
A
really great site to use is booking.com but sometimes they don’t have the
biggest variety of places to stay in a budget. However, I found that in some
cases booking.com was the best option. Another great site, for those who are
looking for a more rustic feel and have a medium budget (say $100-$180 per
night) is bednbreakfast.com. I booked
Paris through there and although I paid a little bit more than the budget, I
think it’ll be worth it for the quaint feel.
Speaking of budget… the rough budget for rooms, that I was trying hard
to stick to, was $30 each per night. In Barcelona we’re staying in a hostel
with our own room and a shared bathroom for
exactly that! I wasn’t so lucky
in Amsterdam where we’ll be staying in a 32 person mixed dorm room and community
bathrooms for the same price! My last advice on booking hostels and hotels
would be to read the reviews. Sometimes
the hotels boast about how close they are to the city center and then you go
read the reviews and more than one person complained about a 9 euro cab ride
just to get to the subway to get downtown.
I also read reviews where people saw rats in rooms and other scary
things! Don’t judge a book by its cover
and don’t judge a hostel just by its website.
In
Europe we’re flying twice… once from Barcelona to Paris and then again from
Amsterdam to Basel, Switzerland. I did a
bit of research and decided to book with Easyjet (again, read reviews!) for
these flights and both were under $120 each. Actually… the flight from
Amsterdam to Basel is only $60! Flying directly into Zurich is nearly
impossible unless you want to pay $600 for Swiss Air, so we are flying to Basel
and taking an hour train ride to Lucern.
The train passes we picked are Eurorail Select, 4 countries and 8 days
of travel. Since we’re still considered
“youth” (18-26 I think) and we’re traveling together at all times, we got a bit
of a discount at $440 each including rail insurance (if we lose them or they
get stolen we’re totally covered… worth it for a $900+ investment!).
As far
as packing goes, we both have Osprey 30L (total volume) backpacks ($110, REI) that
couldn’t weigh more than 7kg for carry on (that’s about 17.6 lbs!). We’ll
definitely have to do laundry on this trip, as we only have enough clothes for
maybe a week. We’ll also have to shop for things like toothpaste, shampoo,
feminine supplies (ugh!), etc. We also
have 1 power adaptor (samsonite universal adaptor with usb plug - $30), camera
and camera cord, ipods, Acer One Netbook ($250 on Newegg.com! 8 hours of battery
life!), our phones (although we won’t use them much), mini padlocks for our
bags, money belt, and that’s pretty much it J
We both admit, the whole not-checking-bags thing is really convenient! Speaking
of that… Since we weren’t planning on checking bags, I was super careful to
read all the rules about carry-ons for this particular airline (LOT Polish
Airlines) and that’s how I knew they couldn’t weigh more than 7kg! And yes…
they actually did weigh them. The poor family
next to us in the check in counter had three bags for the hold and they were
ALL over weight limits. The airline was going to have to charge them almost
$150 extra for all the weight… in addition to fees to check bags in the first
place! What a nightmare.
Dinner
on the place was pretty good… I was totally hoping for perogis (hello? Polish
airlines?), but it was just chicken with mashed potatoes. Nevertheless, we were
pleased to have it! The good news is
that I’ve barely left the country and I’ve already tried new beer. I can’t type the name because it was in
Polish but it tasted like Stella Artois and it was room temperature… (wait, am
I in Malaysia?).
Before
we left Chicago, I checked the schedule for flights from Warsaw to Barcelona
and it looked like they only had one every 24 hours or so. I’m really hoping we
don’t miss our connection because it would be such a shame to lose that time we
could have spent in Spain… if this current flight lands when the pilot said it
would, we’ll have approximately 9 minutes to get to our gate for Spain.
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