Posts Tagged ‘transportation’

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A Train Wreck Of A Site

Without a doubt, the gold standard of train system web sites is DB Bahn for the German train system. One of the really nice things about it is that it has schedules for not just Germany, but the rest of Europe as well. So when it comes to trains, I always check there first. It is unfortunate, however, that you can’t actually buy tickets on the site for anywhere but Germany. Understandable but unfortunate.

This leaves you at the mercy of the site for the country you are trying to buy tickets for. And if their sites are anything like Renfe, the Spanish rail site, that can be a bit of a nightmare. There is ostensibly an English language version of the site but…

I’ll let this quote, from a very helpful article on buying Renfe Tickets Online from TripAdvisor, say it for me:

The website is a bit surreal. It is like Alice in Wonderland, where nothing seems to be what it really is. Even if you are on the English page, you will find some items in Spanish. Sometimes the website will send you to a completely Spanish page! However if you persevere you may be able to save some money by getting the web discounts.

We aren’t taking as many trains as we normally would on a trip like this because of the flights and the car we are renting for the first week. But of the trains we are taking, one is a night train. So I’ll also point you to this great explanation of the different classes to be found when booking a hotel train, and which are the best choices. It’s from the forums of BritishExPats.com. It’s a bit old, but all the information still seems applicable. It mentions that the sleeping cars are segregated by gender unless you pony up for on of the much more expensive private cars. This seems a bit ridiculous if true.

I’m probably going to enlist the aid of a Spanish-speaking friend when I actually book the tickets just to make doubly sure I don’t screw up anything important.

Sigh. Oh DB Bahn , why can’t they all be like you?

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Travel Tips: Flying on the Cheap

One of the things I love about traveling in Europe is the trains. It’s fun to relax and watch the countryside speed by as you head to the next destination (most of which my wife misses as she tends to fall asleep the moment the train starts moving). If we had a better train system here in the states, I’d happily chose that over flying for shorter trips.

Sometimes, however, it’s more convenient and faster to fly. As I mentioned earlier, it was the only way I could get our Spain itinerary to work. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to find some cheap flights throughout Europe. Here are some tips from Budget Travel to help make it easier:

6 Tips for Scoring Deals on Europe’s Budget Airlines | Travel News from Fodor’s Travel Guides.

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General Notes on Spain

I’ve added a bunch of links to the Spain Resources page including all of the hotels we’ve currently booked. Also, some museums and tourist bureau sites for the places we are going to.

We have been focusing on getting the first week of the trip locked down because that’s the leg that my parents will be joining us on before they head off to Barcelona and we head off to Valencia (after spending an extra day in Sevilla). Now that we’ve finished booking hotels for that part of the trip, we can start to concentrate on the rest.

As I mentioned, I had a lot of trouble coming up with a workable itinerary because Spain is so big and the train system isn’t quite as extensive or fast as it has been in some of the other countries we’ve visited. What finally enabled me to come up with a plan was using the cheap flights offered by Vueling to mke a few of the larger hops between cities more doable and time efficient.

We’re a little over two months out, and at this point I’m getting pretty excited about the whole thing. I even bought a new lens for the trip. One with a wide range so I could wouldn’t have to be swapping out lenses on the fly. Between that and my Lensbaby I should be all set.

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Let the planning commence

So last night I received not one, not two, but three, three new books on France. One, Let’s Go France 2007, from the fine folks at Amazon and two from my connection at Rick Steves. Those would be the Paris 2007 and the Provence 2007.

Now I can dive into the meat of the planning process, which I have actually all ready started.

For instance I discovered that we can fly from Nice to Paris for around $23 on EasyJet. Which means no long train trip eating up most of a day towards the end of our trip. We can actually fly to de Gaulle the morning of our return and make it there in plenty of time to catch our outbound flight.

This will make planning a bit easier as we no longer have to worry about making our route more circular.

Très Bien!

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