Introduction and Itinerary - Europe 2014

Hi everyone, I have decided to start attempting to write a blog because I am hoping to have a place to share some of my trip reports beyond the short updates I send out via email or Facebook. Before I head off to Stanford in the fall I have two major trips planned, and I figured this would be the best way to offer some insight into my planning and allow you to participate in some armchair travel. I have no idea how often I’ll be updating this, but as new ideas and details come to mind, I hope to make a few posts regarding some of the logistics and planning that is going into the trip before I actually leave on May 15^th. 

As you may have gathered by now, most of my writing here will primarily be travel-related, but I may throw in a post about something else from time-to-time. At some point I’ll probably go back and write about a few of my past trips, but for now, I’ll be sticking to talking about my upcoming trip(s). I’ll start at the beginning – From planning an itinerary to booking hotels and airfare, I hope to offer some insight into my methodology when researching and planning a trip, then a bit of a travelogue (and tips) from each location once I have visited.

Now, onto my trips: The first is a 7-week trip in Europe, visiting primarily Northern destinations. The second is a 3-week trip to Istanbul and a couple Baltic countries. The former begins on May 15^th, the latter on August 7^th. I haven’t fully planned the latter trip yet, so I will be focusing on the former for now.

So, first things first…

The Itinerary:

I knew I had a large chunk of time available to travel, since I had no plans between when I graduate (May 10^th or so – nothing official really) and the summer nationals in Vegas in July. I was considering visiting Asia or Australia, but the combination of being too expensive and my traveling alone made me decide to stick to Europe for this summer.

With the entry of Norwegian Air Shuttle into the US market, airfares to Scandinavia have dropped tremendously. In the past, flights like New York to Milan were often the cheapest option, but now many cities in Scandinavia are cheaper, even for summer travel. Since I am crediting my flights to Aegean Airlines now (more on that another time – they are the shortcut to Star Alliance Gold status), I wanted to fly either US Air or SAS. I found cheap flights on SAS that fit my schedule perfectly, so I was all set: I had a start date of May 15^th in Copenhagen and an end date of July 9^th in Stockholm… The challenge was filling in 54 days of blanks.

As usual, I started my planning by exploring Google Maps and deciding if there was anywhere I wanted to ensure I could visit no matter what. This time around, those places were Reykjavik, Paris, and St. Petersburg. With those cities in mind, I started building an itinerary playing connect-the-dots on Google maps. Initially I thought I would spend time in the Baltic countries before/after Russia, but due to logistical and time considerations caused by needing a Russian visa, I decided to save those for my August trip.

Though my destinations were not geographically close together, getting around Europe is super-easy thanks to the combination of budget airlines, great train systems, and the extensive network of many regular airlines. In many cases, it is almost as quick to go from Paris to Amsterdam by train as it is to fly from Copenhagen to Madrid – Just because places seem far apart doesn’t mean they are difficult to get to. Of course, I still tried to optimize my itinerary to avoid doubling back a bunch, but even places like Reykjavik and St. Petersburg really aren’t far-fetched at all when taking full advantage of the wide variety of transportation options available across Europe.

I won’t go into all the details of how I eventually wound up with my current itinerary, but I mostly pieced it together using Google Maps, picking out cities and places that seemed interesting and then considering the practicality of reaching that place. Picking cities was the easy part though… The hard part was deciding how long to stay in each place.

I’m a fast-paced traveler. I try to maximize my time in each city by avoiding mid-day transit options, and I usually try to hit the ground running in each place I visit. It is a very tiring style of travel, but it is also extremely productive and rewarding. Of course after a week or two of this, I need a couple days to really relax and just enjoy whatever city I am visiting. Since I know my travel-style, I knew I needed to add a day or two of down time for every couple weeks of travel.

Tripadvisor is my best friend. It is an invaluable trip-planning resource, and I spend countless hours browsing information for each city I plan to visit. While I usually have a general idea how long I want to spend in each city, Tripadvisor helps me adjust that to be even more accurate.

It’s impossible to plan everything perfectly though, and depending on flexibility, it can even be fun not to plan at all! For my summer trip last year, I planned a start city and an end city and a general route, but didn't do much beyond that. Since I had a rail pass, I was completely flexible, and I wound up visiting several places I never would have visited if I had planned extremely rigidly. Unfortunately this luxury of flexibility isn't always possible, and for this year since I’ll be relying a lot more on flights, last-minute plans simply weren't an option. Over-planning definitely is a problem, but sometimes you have to lock yourself into certain dates or locations. As always, when planning, being flexible is vital: Be open to changing dates, rearranging itineraries, cutting cities that are inconvenient, and adding cities that you stumble upon in your research. My initial itinerary was very different from the one I have now!

With all that in mind, after several weeks of rather intense planning, I now have a working itinerary and am in the process of booking hotels, trains, planes, buses, tours, and countless other things. Here’s my itinerary:

Copenhagen	5/16/2014 (Morning)	5/18/2014 (Evening)
Trondheim	5/18/2014 (Evening)	5/21/2014 (Morning)
Alesund	5/21/2014 (Evening)	5/22/2014 (Evening)
Hurtigruten Ferry	5/22/2014 (Evening)	5/23/2014 (Afternoon)
Bergen	5/23/2014 (Afternoon)	5/24/2014 (Morning)
Oslo	5/24/2014 (Evening)	5/27/2014 (Morning)
Reykjavik	5/27/2014 (Morning)	6/1/2014 (Morning)
Glasgow (Day), Inverness	6/1/2014 (Morning)	6/4/2014 (Morning)
Edinburgh	6/4/2014 (Morning)	6/6/2014 (Evening)
London	6/6/2014 (Evening)	6/8/2014 (Morning)
Paris	6/8/2014 (Afternoon)	6/13/2014 (Morning)
Geneva (Day), Interlaken	6/13/2014 (Evening)	6/15/2014 (Evening)
Lucerne	6/15/2014 (Evening)	6/17/2014 (Evening)
Frankfurt	6/17/2014 (Evening)	6/20/2014 (Morning)
Trier	6/20/2014 (Morning)	6/21/2014 (Afternoon)
Amsterdam	6/21/2014 (Afternoon)	6/25/2014 (Morning)
Moscow	6/25/2014 (Afternoon)	6/29/2014 (Overnight Train)
Veliky Novgorod	6/29/2014 (Morning)	6/30/2014 (Evening)
St. Petersburg	6/30/2014 (Evening)	7/5/2014 (Morning)
Stockholm	7/5/2014 (Morning)	7/9/2014 (Morning)

As you can see, I will be relying heavily on morning and evening transportation options, and will be making a few very short overnight stops. I don’t like sleeper trains, so I tend to avoid those even though they save time. I will be forced to take one to Veliky Novgorod, but otherwise will likely steer clear of them.

An approximate visual view of my itinerary:

I'm drawing a bat-figure across Europe! (drawn using GCMap)

I'm really excited about this trip actually happening, and given the amount of time I have devoted to planning it so far, I hope things go off relatively smoothly. I'm a firm believer in Murphy's Law when applied to travel though, so if I make my first 5 or 6 transportation connections, I'll start to expect a worker's strike, a flat tire on a bus, or maybe even poor WiFi at one of my accommodations... Oh, the horror.

I'll try to share some more details soon, but given that May 15th is rapidly approaching, I have a lot of details to work out before then!