What worked for us

Now that we are back from Europe I'll be blogging about where we went to, what we did, what worked / didn't work for us, and what we really found interesting. I'll do a breakdown of the cities later on one by one as I have time.

First off, if you are travelling across timezones I would plan your first day in detail as much as you can and then some. I wish that we had more detail for our first day, but I don't think that would have been possible. Go over where you will arrive in the city, where you will be going, how you are going to get there, what passes you will have to buy, etc. We asked the info people what we should buy and they didn't really layout the most cost effective option for us. Lesson learned. However, we did try our best and wrote down as much info as we could from home, but it didn't really mean much to us while we were here.

Second, if you are planning to "choose your own vacation" like we did I would get a really good book in the Lonely Planet line. We had the Mediterranean Europe one and it was really worth the cash we paid for it. It gives a quick break down of cities and has places to stay, things to do, places to eat / drink. It was just awesome.

At the start of the trip we thought that the maps and the phrases that were included in the book were enough. They were not. We wished that we had more phases at our disposal, especially restaurant phrases and translations.

Maps were easy enough to come by. When you come into a city / town there is usually a tourist office in the train station or whatever which provide excellent (usually) maps. The tourist info offices usually provide great, up to date info about where to stay in a price range, where to do laundry, etc. But beware: one thing that burned us several times is that if someone doesn't know the answer they may just point you in a (random) direction and then you are someone else's problem. If you feel they are sketchy on the details, they may not know.

Maps are great. But not all streets are equal even though they look the same on the map. In some places like Spain or Portugal "streets" can be a stair well or a small dark alley piled with garbage. In Canada there are street signs at least on one corner (by the curb) with what the streets are. In Europe they have them labelled on the buildings. If you are on the other side of the street it is very hard to see the signs if they are not hidden by a tree, awning, painted over, faded out, etc, or there at all. Some times the street will change it's name (without a label) for 20 feet of the street. It can be very hard to find things in older sections. Tourist maps also don't have sections labelled as "sketchy area, don't go here" on them either. If you start to walk into an area you don't feel good about, turn around and find another way. Pretty simple.

Okay, that's it for this one. ;-)