Viva Spontaneität!

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It all started when I created a low-fare email alert for Seattle-Frankfurt am Main. I set it at what I figured was a ridiculously low threshold and didn't think about it again.

Until last week, when it triggered. $450. LOLwut?!

Just wrapping up a brutal month of 60-ish hour workweeks trying to deliver a software product, looking for a way to relax and reward myself, and airfares to Europe in this shoulder season are crazy low thanks to the economic downturn.

On the other hand, I still haven't fully paid off the credit card from the last trip and that is not OK.

On the other other hand, ZOMG $450. (Last summer was $1,500.)

At the end of last year's trip, I started thinking that off-season or shoulder season might be good enough for me rather than the outrageously expensive high season. Beautiful summer weather is nice, but I'm from Seattle for heaven's sake; clouds and rain might be a worthwhile tradeoff to be rid of crowds. (And in Praha this last August, we got the worst of both anyway.) I also reflected on how exhausting the epic monthlong journeys can be... the last stop always gets short shrift no matter how compelling a place it is. Finally, having no interest in night trains, it's becoming harder to chain together the far-flung locales on my dream list.

All this has me wondering whether taking shorter trips in cheaper seasons might allow me to go more often... a brilliant tradeoff if I can make it work.

And thus, I scurried off to Travelocity and Orbitz to see whether any of my dream list locales were as affordable as trusty Frankfurt.

$850 Kraków!
$850 Wien (Vienna)!
$790 Budapest!
$680 Praha (Prague)!
$640 München (+ Salzburg)!
$630 Dresden!
$600 Berlin!
$600 København (Copenhagen)!
$590 Amsterdam!

I even considered Gdańsk, formerly the Free City of Danzig, with its historic Hanseatic center, where ancestors of mine may or may not have come from.

I settled on Kraków, Poland with a visit to nearby Auschwitz and possible day trip Olomouc in Moravia, Czech Republic. I mentioned this for informative purposes only to my dear sweetheart, who astounded me by wanting to come along! He's never been anywhere in Europe, and the decision to go to Kraków had been mine alone when I was thinking solo, so this threw everything back in the air as far as I was concerned. After a comedy of negotiations, we ended up right back on Kraków.

With some fast adjustments to allow him more recovery time after his upcoming minor surgery, I was ready to book. I called my favorite Seattle travel agent with the date range and prices I was seeing on Orbitz. We ran into two problems right away. First, she couldn't match the prices I was seeing. I went back to Orbitz on my own, and almost all the lowest-price fares were for trips with insanely long layovers (15+ hours in one case) or several short legs with switches of not just flight, but carrier. Kraków was already the highest priced of all our alternatives, probably too much at $850 really.

Travel buddy sweetheart was busy at work, no time for more lengthy negotiations, fast judgment call needed. I punched in our second choice, Wien (Vienna). Clicking through one of the $850 options, totally unexpectedly a $765 flight popped up, 1 stop via the Lufthansa Seattle-Frankfurt nonstop on the way there, 1 stop via the SAS Copenhagen-Seattle nonstop on the way back, totally reasonable layovers and no changes of carrier on either leg. Holy cow! Book it!

Wien is more expensive to stay in, so I suspect we'll be paying back our thrifty airfare when it comes time to book a Pension (B&B), but it's a dream destination for my Western Art Music savvy sweetheart and couldn't be more perfect for his first time in Europe. Gute Reise!

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