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!

I entered and didn’t really think much of it. No one ever wins these things, right? Then I got an email: I won!!!

Needless to say, I was in shock. I won round-trip tickets on Virgin Atlantic, a Eurail Pass, and a Busabout Pass. PERFECT. Just what I needed. I was going to try to minimize the actual travel I did just so I could get the cheapest Eurail pass, but now I don’t have to worry about that!

The one thing that puts a wrench in the gears is the fact that I already booked my plane ticket! I have to figure out how to either get out of the ticket without losing money or reschedule the flights to go from SFO -> EWR for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’ll also be flying in and out of London instead of into Madrid and out of Edinburgh.

Those details are still being worked out. I’m working with a STA Travel representative to get all of the details in order and I’ll keep you posted!

This trip just got soooo much better!!!

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)

That posed a bit of a problem when it came to figuring out my itinerary. I had a list of cities that I rattled off, but I couldn’t really tell you how far apart they are or where a good number of them are in relation to each other. I needed a map. A good one. Off to the book store I went, but to my surprise, price tags were upwards of $20. $20! For a map! No thanks. That’s why we have the internet. After a little poking around I found a decent, grammar school geography class map that was perfect for my needs (like I said, I’m a bit geographically challenged). I needed a way to “stick pins” in the map so I could see if any logical patterns would emerge that would help me to decide where to fly in and where to fly out. Using my trusty list, I marked down the cities on the map in 3 colors: definitely, hopefully, and possibly. (And yes, I realize those aren’t colors).

With all of the points laid out before my eyes, it finally hit me: holy crap there’s no way I’m going to cover all of this. Soon followed by: why the hell is Athens so far away?! And Stockholm?! Come on now, Europe, how about some better planning? I wanted to sleep on it before I started to eliminate any cities. Visions of Dijkstra’s danced through my head. At least it was a break from those photography nightmares I’ve been having.

The next day I decided that it would make the most sense to see where the Eurail could take me. Maybe that would help in my decisions? This Eurail route map is a godsend. Especially the mini map in the bottom right corner with estimated travel times. Fantastic. I printed it out and started to connect the dots, cross out some lines, connect again, rinse and repeat.

Enter reality check.

With rough underestimates of how much travel time is needed and how many days I would stay in each place, I would need at least 90 days to complete the map with all of the points I put on it. That’s 30 days more than I actually have. And since I don’t want this to be a complete whirlwind tour, I’m going to have to prune back a lot. That means going from 32 to…well less than 25 but likely less than 20.

The likely candidates will be the outliers: Lisbon, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Budapest are first on the chopping block. I’d also like to maximize my time in Spain and Italy because that’s where I’d like to go most.

The good news is that I’ve made progress. The bad news is that I still have a long way to go, but I’m not complaining. If I’m having this much fun planning, I can only imagine how much fun the actual trip is going to be!