Gaggle Splat

The trip to Europe this August is pretty much all set, thank god. I think this is the first trip that I've planned completely on my own and, while I love planning and think I would make a terrific travel agent, I can definitely see why people pay extra so someone else will do all the work. This trip has been like my full-time job the past couple of weeks.

A couple of recommendations for other travellers:

• Don't work with Susan at Breakaway Travel in Ypsilanti, MI. She's annoying, very slow, and adds hidden surcharges to your total for all of her "hard work". On second thought, I guess if you're rich and have all the time in the world, you could work with her, but still...
• Buy stuff through STA travel! They're super nice!
• Allow three hours every time you call Rail Europe (and trust me, to get your seat reservations right, you'll have to call multiple times). You will be on hold for AT LEAST an hour, unless you manage to time your call just right smack in the middle of the day.
• And that reminds me... make sure to allow room in your budget for seat reservations in addition to your EuroRail passes. Someone got smart and decided to charge the tourists for both their discounted passes and an additional price for their actual seat, lucky us.
• Remember to breathe... just because the one perfect hostel is booked doesn't mean there isn't a cheaper, nicer hotel available that happens to be closer to the train station.

EuroRail

The passes are here! The passes are here!

The trip feels so much closer now that I've received the EuroRail passes from STA Travel. Now I just have to make sure all the annoying, expensive seat reservations go through.

Discarded Cities

I feel kind of stupid. When I originally wrote the budget for August in Europe, I should have looked closer at the Rail Europe website. But, to be fair, it isn't exactly clearly advertised that in addition to purchasing rail passes, it is necessary to PAY MONEY to purchase a seat reservation. I just thought that, you know, I had to call or use the website to book us seats, but that they would be free with our already-purchased, uber-expensive passes.

Silly me.

Turns out that seat reservations can cost anywhere from $10-150 per person! And, of course, they charge a ton on the overnight trains to compensate for the fact that tourists take them to avoid staying in a hotel. How the hell am I supposed to save money now?!?

After stressing, I've realized the only logical thing to do is discard some of the smaller cities from the trip. Strangely, Hamburg (not a small city at all, in fact, it's the second largest in Germany) was the first to be cut. I'm rationalizing this by the fact that we were going to have to take public buses by ourselves out of the city to see a not-super-important-on-the-scale-of-all-importantness concentration camp. The second to go was Weimar, which just makes sense, I mean that place was small.

Strangely, with all this rearranging, Warsaw (a place with no standing concentration camps, but some Jewish history) has become a two-night venture and Oswiecim (the home of Auschwitz) is being reduced to a day-trip due to a lack of sanitary and satisfying public transportation and hotels. Hopefully this all works out...