September 1-30, 2015
Introduction
After months of planning, the time is finally here to get excited for our trip to Europe. We worked practically every day since April 2014, with a few exceptions. We went out looking for a van for our business. I took a trip to visit my grandma in the nursing home. We searched for the perfect convertible, and moved from one apartment to another. We deposited all of our money in the bank. We drew caricatures, painted wiggly kid’s faces, did henna tattoos, and made letter brush paintings of princesses; on top of my regular 40+ hours a week, designing websites.
As soon as we received a few checks from events that we worked in April and May, we bought the cheapest, plane tickets that we could find. Elizabeth went on a website, where she read that Copenhagen was the cheapest city in Europe to fly into, with the exception of Moscow. There were odd connections available such as San Diego to Moscow to Copenhagen, but we eventually agreed, that after a 15 hour flight from San Diego to Moscow, it wouldn’t be worth our sanity to fly another 5-7 hours from Moscow to Copenhagen, just to save $100.
So, Where are we going?
Ever since the internet was invented and I learned that there was a place in Germany called, Holtwick, I knew that I had to go there. My wanderlust grew, as I would zoom in on the AOL map to see three streets, and read about the legend of the Holtwicker Ei (Holtwick Egg). It is said, that the devil wanted to destroy the church in Holtwick with a granite rock, but when he threw it, he missed. My friend Tim said, that was the origin story of lot German villages.Another experience on my German pilgrimage list was to participate in the München Oktoberfest. Every city, in America, has an Oktoberfest in the middle of October, where people drink beer, wear lederhosen, a have a jolly good time, but that isn’t the REAL Oktoberfest.
When I was thinking about this trip, I started looking at the map of Europe, and thinking of all the places that I wanted to go and the shortest distance between each place. The top cities on my list were Amsterdam, Paris, Geneva, Venice, Vienna, and Prague. Some of these cities are up to a 10 hour train ride apart. We didn’t want to spend a whole day on a train. We thought we should hop out and look around, before we go? That’s the way that cruise ships do it. You travel from port to port, you see something for a day and then you are off to the next place. Except that we would do it on land!
I started researching distances and times between destinations by train, thinking about cities that would be interesting to visit, and I narrowed down my search by adding Hamburg, Belgium, and Milan to the list. The more that we talked to friends and watched Rick Steves videos; the more I decided that we HAD to go to Florence. As an artist and a former art history student, I can’t believe that I hadn’t insisted that be an essential from the start!
A friend recommended renting a car and driving the whole trip, but not only did that not seem like the most authentic backpacking experience, I also didn’t want to have to deal with the complications that go along with driving. I kept imagining driving for hours looking at road signs that weren’t in English or relying too much on the GPS to guide me where to go. I also didn’t want to have to worry about pumping liters of gas into the car or trying to find parking in cities that were built without cars in mind.
We concluded that we were going to travel primarily by train and for a short time, rent a car. I started looking up the different train companies and pricing out train tickets, while also trying to learn more about the Eurail pass. Whenever you hear about people taking a tour of Europe, you hear about the rail passes. I never knew anyone personally that bought one, so I didn’t really know how it worked. When you go to the Eurail website, it is completely generic.
It is great for people that have purchased one before and want to keep buying them, but for someone that is completely inexperienced when it comes to traveling Europe, it leaves you wanting more. There is no phone number on the website, so you don’t have access to a human on the other end to answer all of your stupid little questions and what ifs. If you have a question, you email in, and hope that you phrased your question in a way that someone, with English as a second language can understand.
If you are travelling to more than 4 countries, the best ticket to buy is the Global Pass, which allows you to travel to 28 countries. When you click on the “Eurail Passes” link, it says “Global Pass…From USD $344”. Wow, that sounds like a great deal! But, oh crap! That’s for someone ages 12-25 for 5 days within a 10 day period. So, that is why people say to travel while you’re young. As soon as you turn 26, rail passes go from $344 to $526 per person. If you are traveling for 5 days within a 10 day period, maybe it is a great buy. However, if you price out the train tickets over the course of a full month, and they average to be $105 or more for each ticket, plus the seat reservation, and depending on where you are traveling to, and your trip time, you may find that it’s cheaper to buy the tickets individually.
When I was looking up individual tickets from between cities using raileurope.com and the train company sites, I found that even with the rain pass, they were charging you to ride the train and reserve your seat. Some of the tickets were $40 with the rail pass and $100 without the rail pass. So even after buying the $526 pass, I would have to pay an addition $40 for the ticket/seat reservation. I might be completely wrong in my processing, but because the Eurail site, doesn’t have someone that you can talk to on the phone to explain things, you are just left guessing.
The thing that I did learn from reading through the Eurail page was the names of the government run train companies in each country, that we were going to be traveling in. Here’s a tip, the saver ticket is non-refundable and only good for that train, but if you buy it a few months in advance, it’s practically half the normal price. Another thing is that there isn’t a flat rate for every destination. When you buy the ticket, when the train leaves, and which class that you are traveling in can make a big difference in the price. A train leaving at 7am might be 20 euros, but a train going to the same destination might be 40 euros at 8am. And depending how far in advance you buy the ticket and how many tickets are left, a ticket could be $52 on Tuesday morning, and $140 on Wednesday night. It’s the same as buying a plane ticket. I suppose that theoretically, if you had the rail pass, then no matter how high or low the ticket price went, you would pay the same rate. However, you would still have to reserve seats when applicable, so that you don’t end up on a train with no seat for 4 or more hours.
So, Where are we staying?
When you think of a Euro trip from the movies, people just wing it. They show up in city, hop on a bed in a hostel, and then get drunk. The more, I read, the less likely I thought that would be possible. The whole backpacking Europe fantasy usually has a couple of college kids, with no job, and no hurry to return home, and they can sort of just screw around, and see where life takes them. When you have a full time job, rent to pay, and an obligation to make it back to the real world within a certain time frame, it’s probably best to start looking into some definite lodging. It is playing it safe, but once you get to be in your 30’s, sleeping in a train station or on a park bench, just seems too unpredictable.
I posted a status update on Facebook saying, that I was looking for people to stay with in Europe, but I guess that most of my regular followers, don’t know anyone in Europe. I started looking into hostels. The idea of staying in a hostel room with 7 other people sounds fun, but I think that for the most part, hostels are for single people that don’t mind crashing with strangers, and not for married couples. I browsed the booking sites and started looking at hotels, but all of them seemed to really increase our costs. Then I discovered Airbnb.
My friend, Chuck, stayed at an Airbnb in Portland, a few months prior and he thought it was great. I figured I would give it a shot and see what came from it. I sent out a few requests, but either they expired or my request was declined. I learned that it’s good etiquette to contact the host ahead of time and then get pre-approved for the listing. Once you are pre-approved, then you have 24 hours to book the room. We ended up finding places to stay on Airbnb for most of the trip, but we have a few days set up on couchsurfing.com. We are also camping for a few days, staying with a cool designer, Jeremy, in Belgium, and a lesbian, Chinese, pharmacist in Berlin, whom we know through other people.
What about Work?
I was pretty freaked out about how my boss would react, that I decided that I was actually going to go through with traveling Europe for a whole month. I had mini anxiety attacks and shortness of breath. I was up at night thinking about what my bosses would say, if I wasn’t in the office for a month. I tried to come up with a scheme that would involve me working remotely. I would bring my laptop in my backpack, stay up weird hours, keep up with all my work the whole trip, and it would be like I was just quietly sitting in my cubicle.
Meanwhile, my boss was planning a trip to Italy, where he would be out of the office for a month. After putting off talking to him, I waited until the day before he was leaving and I wrote a long email, telling him my intentions. As soon as I clicked send, his vacation notification emailed me back, and I just had to wait. A month had gone by and I was just assuming that everything would be fine, we would just talk about it when he came back.
The first couple days after he came back to the office, he was completely jetlagged. He talked about his trip and put out fires that we had created, while he was away. After about a week, I emailed him again. This time, he emailed back, “We have to talk.” and he set up a meeting on my calendar. The meeting was 3 days away, so I awkwardly waiting around the office and tried not to do anything stupid that would sway his decision. I messaged my friends and asked them, what they thought would happen. I started thinking about what I would do, if I had to quit my job to go on this amazing trip.
The day of the meeting came and I worked my ass off up until the meeting started. My boss called me into the conference room and he told me, “You’re not going to be able to work remotely on your trip.” I got nervous and thought that it was all over. “If you are going to be traveling from city to city, and not knowing where you are going to be from one day to the next, trying to get your work done is going to be a disaster. And you aren’t going to want to work. When I was in Italy, I maybe got on my computer once, the whole time I was there.” He went on to tell me that I technically only have 2 weeks of vacation time a year, but since I went to see my dying granny, I was down to 1 week. But he said, that he would let me borrow a week from next year and then have two weeks off unpaid. It was a glorious moment. A huge weight was lifted off my shoulders. He went on to tell me about his trips to Italy and France and gave me some of his travel tips. He is even letting me borrow his unlocked iPhone with the travel apps still installed! So things are going to be O-KAY!
This week, I passed on my work on to other people in the office and worked on making sure that everything would be covered.
Packing for 30 days abroad
When backpacking Europe, the most important thing to bring is your backpack. While researching some packs, I watched some videos on youtube on “What to pack” and looked at what the people were using. To sort of get a feel for what I was going to be carrying my goods in, Elizabeth and I made a stop at the outdoor warehouse store, REI. The guy in the camping section, of course, was trying to convince us to buy the most expensive everything, for our trip.
We tried on a few packs and the clerk showed us which size pack was recommended for our particular trip. He said that Elizabeth was a size small or extra small, and I was a size medium. He told us that for the length of trip that we were embarking on that we should get packs that were between 60-75 liters. These are the huge packs with the metal frame. He put 30lbs worth of weight into the pack that fit me the best. Oof! That is when I knew that this trip was going to be a chore.
After the bearded clerk went through his lifetime of hiking adventures, he told us that if we bought the $20 REI club card, we then would be invited to the exclusive REI quarterly garage sale, the next night. What is the REI quarterly garage sale? It’s a parking lot, black friday style sale, with the lines, shoving and hoarding of goods. The sale is made up of damaged and returned REI goods marked down up to 70% off. Everything from kayaks to go pro cameras were available, but we were after backpacks and tents. We stayed at REI until the stored closed and talked about sleeping bags, tents, air mattresses, and picked out the packs we wanted.
Elizabeth wasn’t feeling well the next day, so I was on my own for the free-for-all sale. Backpacks and tents were lining the parking lot. When the store opened the gate, people were grabbing 10 backpacks, 10 tents, and 10 of everything else. I grabbed 3 packs that looked like they would fit me and a tent that half resembled the one that we liked from inside the store. Within a few minutes, I found my Osprey Aether 70 (Original Price $289 for $165) and a REI Quarter Dome T2 tent (Original Price $269 for $65). In all the mayhem, I wasn’t able to find a pack that would fit Elizabeth, but we went back a few weeks later to pick up the one in the store that she liked.
With the packs figured out we had to list all of the things that we wanted to fill them with. We intend to do caricatures and face paint in town squares and in tourist spots, so we needed to pack the bare essentials. We are packing 2-2lb camping chairs, a 12”x20” drawing board, a folding easel, along with our paper, markers, and paints.
As far as clothes, I am packing really really light. A pair of slacks, a pair of jeans, a pair of sweatpants, 2 t-shirts, 2 pairs of boxers, a pair of black socks, and a pair of white socks, including the clothes that I am going to be wearing.
The things that we needed to remember to bring were the right power adaptors and money. We are packing adaptors that work in France, Germany and Italy. We are also bringing Euros that we bought from our bank, so that we don’t have to endure exchange fees from private sellers. We are probably going to be using a credit card for a number of our larger purchases, but when you buy a gyro on the street, you can’t guarantee that he is going to take Visa.
When you are so used to staying local, you forget that the phone charges for roaming in a different continent are INSANE! So, while I am going to be shutting off my phone, my cool boss is going to let us borrow his old iphone and our friend Tim is letting us borrow his non-data phone that already is set up with an European SIM card. I am going to have to buy a SIM card for the iPhone, but it will be way cheaper than finding out that it costs $200 to make a few phone calls.
My pack seems to weigh well over the 30lbs that I tried on at REI, but I am also adding in cameras, game boys, sketchbooks, and other artist tools. Hiking with 50 lbs on your back, might not seem like a lot, if you are a conditioned United States Marine, who just got out of basic training, but for a 35-year old, out of shape, desk jockey, it’s a shock to the system. Now, I could’ve easily lightened my load, if I wasn’t an artist and I wasn’t camping. We have 2 days left until we leave, things are getting real. The bags are packed, but I still feel like we are forgetting something already.
At the Airport
We have 15 minutes until boarding and all I can think about is, “did I forget something?” My huge backpack was filled to the brim and weighed in at 35lbs, and my “day” pack has blankets, phones, an ipod, a nintendo DS, my tablet, and a travel keyboard. Everything that I could ever need on 15 hours of air travel is charged and ready to go, but do I need all this stuff?
In the past, I have only ever traveled across the states. San Diego to Chicago, San Diego to New York, San Diego to Cleveland. All of these trips have averaged 5-6 hours on a plane. Most of the flight I am trying to sleep, but more times than not, if there is on board entertainment, in the form of a movie, that is all the distraction that I need.
See, I am not the best flyer. I took my first flight when I was 7 to San Francisco, but then didn’t fly again until I was 21. I don’t have that experience of a comfortable flight, so every flight is a struggle. When you are 6’1 and 190lbs and you are jammed in seats that seem to allow less leg room every time you fly, you need as much distraction as possible to keep your mind off how claustrophobic you feel. As I’ve gotten bigger and more spoiled with wide open spaces, I am very uncomfortable in tight spaces. I don’t even like sitting in the backseats of cars. So, yeah, wish me luck. The flight is boarding, so I have to go!