Well that’s it – classes are over, finals are over, and all that’s left to do is graduate. These last few weeks have been absolutely crazy. but they’re over and now I have an entire week (a.k.a. Senior Week) to just hang out in Ithaca and do whatever my little heart desires. And then I realized: oh boy, I’m leaving in 16 days. I don’t even know where I’m going to stay or where I’m going to go! So much to do!

So my week of downtime has turned into a week of scouring the web for planes, trains, ferries and hostels to try to piece together at least the first few weeks of my trip. It’s been a very expensive past few days and I’ve only booked about two weeks worth of travel and lodging, but I think that’s more sticker shock than anything else.

Why the changes? Well, I’ve decided to put myself at the whim of cheap transportation and (hopefully) comfortable, but affordable hostels. Along the way I’ve found a few sites to be absolutely indispensable:

Skyscanner.net

Skyscanner.net is amazing. You must check it out. I’ve been using it something like this: 1) Enter current city (i.e. Barcelona) 2) Choose “Any Country” as destination and see what it spits out. I found a €20 trip to Copenhagen from Barcelona and it turned out to be the cheapest and most interesting next stop so I decided to ditch my original plan of flying to Rome or Naples and will get to see a place that I’ve had on my list for a while. Score! The trick is to be flexible with your dates, though. Always check +/- 1 day from your intended departure because the fares are extremely variable (€9.99 on one day and €32.59 the next!). Really, the site is fantastic.

Hostelworld.com

I mentioned Hostelworld.com when I was interviewed for a Wall Street Journal article on Deals on Travel Abroad. In addition to the cheap airfare, I’ve found that it’s also important to check the hostel listings before booking your ticket. What good is a €9.99 fare if you’re going to be stuck in some hole-in-the-wall at your destination? Or, maybe one plane ticket is slightly more expensive than the other, but perhaps at the more expensive destination you can stay in a posh B&B for the same price as the hole-in-the-wall in the cheaper one (Palermo won this battle. Private room in a B&B for cheaper than a mid-rate hostel anywhere else I could fly cheaply).
When checking reviews on HostelWorld, I always sort Lowest to Highest rated because people are generally very specific about what they don’t like and very vague about what they do. It lets you decide what you’re willing to put up with. If two hostels are rated equally and they’re around the same price, I’d take creaky floorboards over dirty showers.

The Others

Though I haven’t booked anything through these sites yet, they’ve been very valuable in helping me to decide what a better sequence of visits would be or whether I should fly vs. taking other modes of transportation.

Planes

I’ve found to avoid EasyJet as much as possible. That line nickels and dimes like you wouldn’t believe. TransAvia‘s final price is quite close to the original quote on Skyscanner.

Trains

RailEurope.com is the best site I’ve found for searching all of the various rail lines at once. Though you don’t get to see the discounts that many of the rail sites would provide on their own sites (The same train from Madrid -> Barcelona was €56 on RailEurope and €33 with a Youth Card on Renfe) it does give you a general idea about prices and travel times.
Speaking of Renfe: Another little trick is to always use the national rail sites in their original language. You can sometimes save €20 by going through the Spanish or German version of the site instead of switching to the English translation. Trickier, but €20 can go a long way!

Ferries

Sorry, no automobiles. Not at the moment at least. The final site that’s been quite useful in gauging prices and opportunity costs (I know, nerdy, but I can’t help it) is aferry.to. It’s another multi-service aggregator that I’ve referenced mostly when I’m in or want to go to a coastal city (duh?). The site is pretty ugly and usability-wise it’s a pain, but it gets the job done. I’ll likely be using it to book a mini-excursion to Split, Croatia during my Italy tour on BusAbout.

But most importantly…

Give your credit card company a heads-up. Even though you’re still in the States (or in your respective home country), don’t forget that these places will likely be booking from an international location and if you’re using your credit card, the credit card company might get suspicious. I didn’t realize this until a hold was put on my card and I had to call up to tell them that I am, in fact, charging all sorts of random things to my account and I’ll be doing so for the next few months.

My itinerary has been through a few facelifts since I originally posted it here and it’s still changing with each stop, so there’s really no point in my posting a new one just yet, but as a brief glimpse: I’m no longer going to Greece, but I’ve added Copenhagen, and Sicily (Palermo) and will likely also add Budapest. For now the bookends of my trip are all sorted out. I have a place to stay in Madrid, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Palermo, and Edinburgh and transportation to/from almost all of them. Still a long way to go, but it’s a start!

So what’s new?
I’m working with someone from STA Travel to get my various passes in order. I’ll be using the BusAbout and Eurail passes that I won to supplement some of my travels around the continent. As for the plane tickets that were also a part of the prize, it looks like I’m going to be planning a second, mini-trip to the UK sometime next spring (yay!).

Because of the BusAbout route, I’ve had to change around my itinerary a bit. The good news is that travel in and around Italy looks like it’ll be taken care of using my Flexipass, but it means that I’ll be rearranging schedule for that leg of the trip. I haven’t quite nailed it down yet, but it looks like I’ll be going Madrid -> Barcelona -> Sicily -> Athens -> Santorini -> Venice then BusAbout to Rome -> Naples -> Florence -> (add in trip to Nice here) -> either Milan or Lake Como -> continue the rest of my trip as planned. Lucky for me that I get to add in two extra stops in Nice and Sicily!

I’ve also sorted out my technology issue, but that’s going to be saved for another post because I don’t want to get too geeky here. The cell phone issue is still one that I haven’t quite figured out yet (I have a locked iPhone), but there’s still time for that part.

In terms of practical things: After some hassles with a particular online retailer, I finally got my backpack. I ordered two so that I could try them on and decided on the Kelty Red Cloud 5600. It fit like a glove when I tried it on in the store and I think it’ll have plenty of space for me to pack lightly but have room to grow (souvenirs!)

Other than that I’m just reading up, resting up, and trying to make it through this last stretch of school in one piece. Posting will be sparse for the next week or so, but then I’ll be back in gear and in full-on getting things done mode because there are only 31 days until I hop on that plane to Madrid!

If you know me at all, your first reaction will likely be along the lines of “WHAT!??!?!??!?!!?” followed by all sorts of visions of me going through some sort of hardcore rehab-esque withdrawal. Yeah, I’ve had those same visions. But in the end I decided that I really don’t need a laptop. For the most part I work in the cloud and while it would be nice to have my trusty MBP around so that I have at least something familiar in my life, it’s big, bulky, expensive, and distracting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about “the future”. You know, flying cars, aliens, computers that fit on your contact lens, that sort of stuff. And I realized, hey, those people won’t be carrying around laptops during their European adventures. No siree. They’d take advantage of the new wave of technology. For someone as purportedly tech-savvy as I am, holding myself to the “old” way of connecting to the webs is just dumb. No no, I’m going travel 2.0. Completely mobile and in the cloud.

To translate for you non-geeks: I’m not going to have my own computer. I’m going to save my stuff on the internet or an external hard drive instead of on a personal computer. Laptops are old news.

So here’s my plan for geeking out while in Europe:

Necessary:

• iPhone
• Skype for iPhone (and a $2.95/month skype-to-phone subscription because my gram doesn’t have a computer)
• Canon 40D and lenses that I’ve yet to decide on. It will likely be something like: wide angle, low-light, zoom.
• Nikon FM or Canon AE-1 Program. I haven’t decided which I like better yet.
• Flip Video Ultra (60 min)
• Renew my Flickr Pro subscription that ends July 1.
• 12-in-1 memory card reader so I can handle CF and SD in one (read: download photos from my camera). It’s a tad large, but not worth buying a new one.
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX01. Best little 3 year old point and shoot there is.
• Foldable Sony headphones. They’re not nearly as small as ear buds, but at least they’ll stay on my ears.
• A Seagate FreeAgent Go 320 GB Portable External Hard Drive that I will have to purchase

Would be nice:

• An eye-fi explore to geotag my photos (and the CF adapter would be nice too).
• Swap out my current Flip Video for its HD cousin: Flip Video MinoHD, 60 Minutes

I think that’s about it! If I do stick to just this list it means that all I really need to acquire is a portable external HD. The other two things that I don’t have would be fun but I don’t think I’ll end up spending the money on them.

I don’t know about you, but that seems like a pretty solid list to me. Nice and compact and accomplishes everything I need it to (at least I think. I guess I’ll be finding out the hard way!). I plan to bring a few non-tech items to make up for the things that I would normally have on my laptop like books and a notebook, but that’s it! Cheap and painless. I like it!

…Now I hope I can just stick to this decision and don’t panic at the last minute and sneak my laptop in my backpack…

This part was actually a bit scary and a bit challenging: some of the numbers that I was calculating were far higher than I anticipated while others were lower. The most difficult part, though, was figuring out how much to budget in for food! I already know to avoid restaurants as much as possible and to try to go to markets and such, but it’s not like I’m going to be buying groceries for a week at a time. And I do want to have the option of eating out every once in a while, because let’s face it, I won’t be able to make pasta as well as the restaurants in Italy and I wouldn’t even know where to begin in cooking an authentic German dinner.

I tried to overestimate everything so I estimated hostels at €30/night which I know is much higher than I’ll actually be paying in most places. and food at something like €22/day. Factor in “odds-n-ends” like museums, transit, etc. and that adds in another €20/day on average (I think?). That brings me to over €70/day which is just about $100. This doesn’t take into account the Eurail pass that I’m still debating…

All said and done, I’m really, really, really hoping to be able to cover the entire trip with $6000. It would be awesome if I can get it even lower, but I’d rather not sacrifice having a good time for a few hundred bucks. This is pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime kind of deal, so as long as I splurge in moderation I think I’ll be OK.

$6000 (plus airfare!) for just over 60 days. Eek that’s a big number. Why does the US Dollar have to be such crap right now?

I have to say, it took a lot for me to cut out places like Glasgow and Stockholm, but when it came down to which places had to get the axe, I tried to pick groupings that would logically form into a future trip: a trip to Scandinavia, for instance, would let me cover Stockholm, Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki and a bunch of other places instead of just the first two. Same goes for the UK. The UK seems like the easiest trip to make somewhere down the line and dedicating an entire trip to the UK would let me cover the more rural parts of England and also fit in Wales and a lot more of Ireland.

So, with the exception of London, none of those places will be included in my trip this summer.

The second bit that helped me to make a lot of big decisions was my initial desire to spend a decent amount of time in Rome or at least somewhere in Italy. I’ve always been a “depth and breadth” kind of person – I like to do a lot of things, but I also like the ability to focus on one or two things to learn in better detail. This was the major turning point in my mapping: spending a large chunk of time in Italy would let me get in the depth part (and hopefully will teach me some Italian along the way) while still letting me see all but a few of the cities on my last map.

With this itinerary, I get the best of both worlds: I get to spend a significant amount of time in Italy (23 days: nearly half of my trip!), but having 14 days in Rome to redistribute if needed gives me a huge amount of flexibility for adding in some secondary cities (the orange dots) or spending an extra day or two in a city that I especially like. Not to mention, having so much time in Rome might open up the possibility of an overnight trip to a place like Split, Croatia which Matt has been trying to sell me on for some time now.

I haven’t yet decided if I want to fly into Madrid and out of London (as I envisioned it as I was mapping this out) or the other way around. I think being able to get settled first would be really helpful, so starting in a country whose language I speak seems logical to me. (I obviously speak English, but my Spanish isn’t too shabby either). There are arguments for either case, but I’ll think on it a couple of days and then hopefully will be able to buy my plane tickets!

So without further ado, here it is!: (click to view larger)

• Amsterdam
• Athens
• Barcelona
• Belfast
• Berlin
• Brussels
• Budapest
• Cardiff
• Copenhagen
• Dublin
• Edinburgh
• Florence
• Frankfurt
• Geneva
• Glasgow
• Lisbon
• London
• Lucerne
• Madrid
• Milan
• Munich
• Naples
• Nice
• Paris
• Pisa
• Pompeii
• Prague
• Rome
• Salamanca
• Salzberg
• Santorini
• Sicily
• Stockholm
• Stonehenge
• Stratford-Upon-Avon (what can I say, I’m a nerd)
• Venice
• Vienna
• Zurich

That’s a bit ridiculous for 2 months, and I realize that. I have these places roughly divided into 3 categories: definitelys, would-love-to-fit-ins, and would-be-cool-but-not-necessaries. The biggest problem I think will be dealing with the outliers like Greece, Spain, Portugal, Stockholm and Copenhagen. I’m not too attached to Stockholm, Copenhagen and Lisbon, but Spain? MUST SEE. Athens? I’d really prefer not to take that out of the itinerary.

So many places, so little time! Perhaps I can skip the rest of this school year and just start my trip early? I’d love to fit in as many of these as possible, but my goal for this weekend will be to cut the list in about half. I think that’ll be more sensible. If I end up at some of the other places along the way, well then that’s great, but otherwise, well, it’s just an excuse for me to go back!

It’s time to get serious.

I was at the campus bookstore the other day and they had some travel guides on sale. $4.00 a piece. I, of course, grabbed a few: Let’s Go Western Europe and Let’s Go Italy. Sure, they’re the 2006 and 2007 editions, but come on, how much do the Roman ruins really change in 2-3 years? The books were pretty useful, but I think they’ll be even more useful once I nail down a preliminary itinerary and time frame so I can look up more specific things.

I think the hardest part about all of this was the sheer scope of the trip. Where do you even begin? (Answer: at the beginning), but where is the beginning? So many questions to be answered.

Last night I spent some quality time scouring the Lonely Planet forums and I have to say that it has been pretty much the only useful place I’ve found so far! I feel like I finally have some direction and a starting point. I’ve got out the post-it notes, my white board has been repurposed as a trip planner, and I’m ready to get down to business.

First steps:

• decide if I want to stay in Rome for an extended period of time as I originally planner or if I want to spend the entire time traveling.
• set down actual dates and find plane tickets
• figure out some sort of budget to make sure I don’t get stranded in Europe (not like that would be completely terrible!)

Hopefully I can dedicate some time this weekend to getting that stuff sorted out. If time works out the way I think it will, I have less than 60 days to plan this whole thing, and that doesn’t count the days where I actually have to focus on schoolwork (ha!). It’s going to be fun though!