Preparing for the trip

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Hi guys
Before we start our big European holiday I thought I would share some of the highlights of planning a 7 week trip with you. It is also a good way to practice using this travelblog before I need to use it in anger. Let me know if you receive this blog by posting a message on the site. As we travel around we would love to receive messages from home keeping us up to date with the latest gossip... I mean news.

Here goes...

As some of you are aware our travel plans started when Geoff retired in April. My first thought was finally I get to spend some money on a great 12 day Mediterranean cruise! and as anyone's thinking would go, you can't go all that way and not see some other great places. So, 12 days blew out to 7 weeks and 4 countries. They are Scotland, Spain (only Barcelona), THE CRUISE, Italy and France. As neither of us have ever been to Europe we wanted to make the most of our time without trying to see too much.

The task of booking everything seemed huge and scarey, so we started at a travel agent to book airfares and the cruise. I think this was a good idea at the time, but next time I will book them myself. It was a matter of confidence in spending sooo much money online that scared me. Anyway, the canny shopper and librarian in me soon took over and I was researching and finding the best deals all over Europe via the internet. At first spending $200 a night on accommodation seemed exorbitant until I realised this was actually a good price, particularly in Venice, Rome and Paris. I could easily have paid anything up to $600-$800 a night. I will never complain about hotel costs in Australia again. I am very grateful to Bronwyn and Judy (my fabulous office team) for giving me some great websites to use such as www.viator.com, www.expedia.com etc. These sites got me started and I soon learned the value of checking reviews of accommodation and comparing prices to get the best value. I visited travel blogs to hear other travellers ideas and picked up useful hints. I started a travel folder to keep track of our bookings which has become a bible of where to go and what to do. As you can tell I am not a heady teenager throwing my cares to the wind, rather a middle aged organiser that likes to know where our next bed and meal will be. This doesn't mean everything is planned in minute detail....alright........ just most of it!

The planning, deciding and booking phase has taken us 3 months with me slaving over a hot computer many nights of each week. I have loved every moment of it except the night I almost lost our rail bookings for Italy and France. I hit the send key with all the details and then noticed a mistake in the booking. I tried to stop the process only to have it all disappear. About 3 days later I finally tracked down our booking and managed to change the mistake. Thank goodness. The dates and accommodation also became a blur of frantic emails and I started getting paranoid that I had missed a booking. So, I methodically double checked everything. Just as well. I had missed completing a rental agreement for our apartment in Rome. That could have been 5 nights accommodation down the drain.

Here we are finally in late July, everything has been booked and we are almost ready to go. We leave on the 23 August which is just 4 weeks away. Not a lot else to do except pack the bags, kiss the moggy goodbye and hand over the keys to Laura (who will do a wonderful job of looking after the house).

Our first flights take us from Canberra to Sydney to London and then on to Edinburgh. So the next time I will write we will be in the home of the Tattoo and the Fringe festival.

cheers Sue

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Photos

Merlin the fetch cat
a practice photo

Comments

[Mee]

It worked
Etc

[Caroline Ambrus]

Missing you already, mum