Friday, August 8, 2008

Trip planning is tiresome

Yesterday I spent most of the day and a great part of the night as well as my first hours up this morning planning trips and calculating how I could pack visiting as many cities on the weekends for as cheaply as possible in my 9 weeks left in Europe. Man, was it time-consuming!

From my endless hours and calculations yesterday and this morning, it looks like my heavy trip period will be in September, where each week I will only be returning to Paris to work Monday through Wednesday. I will not be visiting Nice *tear* but will be going to Dublin, London, Rome, Venice (those are the ones now booked) as well as Barcelona, Cagliari and Milan (to be booked). Then I am torn between doing Amsterdam in one or 2 days or Stockholm for a couple days. I would love to visit the cool places in Amsterdam but I don't think it warrants more than one day yet the train price is kinda high for a one-day trip. At the same time, it would be cool to go to Sweden as it is a Nordic country and as such I imagine it to be different from the other European countries. Amsterdam or Stockholm is an ''either or'' decision because the cost of cheap hotels and even hostels are kinda expensive for both.

Anyways, since I've already done Porto, Madrid and Brussels, it looks like, if all goes well, I will have visited one city in Portugal, one in Belgium, a couple in Spain, a few in Italy, one in England, one in Ireland and then one more in either Sweden or the Netherlands. Not bad, considering I am doing this on a part-time salary, while living in expensive Paris and being limited to traveling Thu - Sun only AND I only decided to start traveling when it got warm aka June.

I really wanted to visit Nice, mainly because of the beach and the reputation of the Côte d'Azur but Barcelona and Cagliari will do...At one point, in the early hours of my planning process yesterday, when I still thought I would visit Nice, I started looking at beach photos....I've mentioned my short attention span before and it wasted no time in kicking in. Thus, I spent a few HOURS looking up beach vacations in Florida, Cuba and Mexico! One ad on the page mentioned Vegas and soon...you know it...that was me looking up Vegas trips too. But ye, the price it would cost to visit and stay a couple days in Nice in August (no space in my calendar for September), I think I could do a week's vacation in Mexico, Cuba or Florida for the same price.

Maybe you can tell from my ramblings above but I cannot believe how much time it took to plan and decide on the few trips I have booked so far. I mean I fell asleep last night with my laptop on my bed while still calculating costs and such and first thing I did when I awoke this morning was to continue the search. I just decided to stop and it is already clear past 3pm in the afternoon. Another day wasted!

Oh well, at least I should be going out this evening.

1 comment:

Case No. i3KXX82c5 said...

Ah...so that's what you were doing when I called last night :)
Sounds painful, the sleep-fog-planning-frenzy. But hey can I throw in three recommendations?
(1) Visit Aix-en-Provence! (or promise you'll visit with me in 2009/2010)
(2) Go to Rome!
(3) Use a travel guide (props to Let's Go [my fav: for the super-budget traveler] & Lonely Planet) and get off the Internet. With a travel guide, you don't have to re-invent the wheel.