|
|
European Vacation Planning
|
|
I then used AltaVista to search for web pages on British and European rail passes, train schedules, and travel guides for several of the cities we wanted to visit. Along the way Prague was added to the tentative itinerary. However, it soon became apparent that going to Vienna and Prague would add too many days of just train riding so we began to look for some alternatives. My wife suggested the Cotswolds in England. We had only heard a little about the area so I searched the web for information on it (http://www.visit-glos.org.uk) as well the nearby city of Bath. The Cotswolds sounded so charming they convinced us to rethink our itinerary. The Cotswolds were in; Vienna and Prague would have to wait for another trip. The final itinerary ended up as follows -- London (4 nights), the Cotswolds (2 nights), York (1 night), Edinburgh (4 nights), Paris (4 nights), Interlaken (4 nights), Sargans (a small Swiss city; 1 night between trains), Oberammergau (1 night), Rothenburg (1 night) and Frankfurt (1 night). Also included were stops in Bath, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Kempten (Germany) to pick up or drop off rental cars. I knew nothing about Kempten except that it was on one of the main rail routes from Switzerland to Germany and had the closest Hertz agency to Bavaria's Neuschwanstein Castle -- a must see stop for us. Kempten was located solely by web searches before ever consulting a conventional paper map. The same goes for Sargans. It replaced St. Moritz as an overnight stop and allowed us to depart from Interlaken in the morning, make a three hour stop in Lucerne for lunch, and still have time to ride a good portion of the route of the Glacier Express -- all in one day. Once the itinerary was fairly firm I began to search for accommodations with a goal of keeping the average cost around $100 per night. I found hotels in London and Frankfurt through the Quality Inns web page (http://www.hotelchoice.com/) and in Rothenburg through the Best Western web page (http://www.bestwestern.com/main.html). I searched for a small hotel in the Opera section of Paris and came up with the Hotel Marsollier Opera -- at one time the residence of Oscar Wilde (http://www.123france.com/ Making the reservation via the internet resulted in a significant discount off the published rate. For the Cotswolds, York, Edinburgh, Interlaken, Sargans, and Oberammergau I searched for B&Bs or small hotels. One of the Oberammergau guest houses, the Gasthof Zur Rose, looked familiar (http://www.oberammergau.de). It turned out to be one where we had stayed in 1990 when we were in Oberammergau for the Passion Play. We stayed there again in 1997. I was able to make all of the reservations directly over the internet or by e-mail for every place but Edinburgh and Sargans, where a B&B and a small hotel were found through web pages but I had to telephone to make the actual reservations -- neither had e-mail or a fax machine. With the accommodations mostly set I used the Eurail pass and Britrail pass web pages to find the best combination of rail and rail/drive passes (http://www.railpass.htm). For the UK the most economical combination was a 6-day Britrail Pass plus Hertz car for myself (3 car days + 3 train days over two months) and an eight consecutive day Britrail Pass for my wife. I used the Hertz web page (http://www.hertz.com) to verify the availability of cars in Bath (for the Cotswolds) and Edinburgh. For the continent I bought two 5-day Europasses. I also bought two discounted Eurostar tickets for a trip through the chunnel from London to Paris. I ordered the rail passes by telephone from Rail Pass Express then called Hertz to reserve the cars in Bath and Edinburgh. The Hertz car that we picked up in Kempten and dropped off in Frankfurt was reserved entirely through the Hertz web page. Next I used internet railroad timetables for England (http://www.railtrack.co.uk/travel/), Scotland (http://www.scotrail.co.uk), Switzerland (http://www.rail.ch) and Germany (http://www.bahn.de/) to plan the details of our train schedules. (Ed. note: The Scotrail link showed up as bad on Dec. 12, 1999.) The Swiss and German internet timetables were especially helpful because they also cover neighboring countries such as France and Austria. You enter the origin city, destination city, date, desired departure time, and intermediate cities (if you want to indicate a specific route) and the timetable comes back with several options around the input departure time. Finally, I used AltaVista to search for tourist type information for each city, town or area where we were stopping. I found much more than I can describe. One example was Giverny which we visited on a day trip from Paris by train. The Giverny web page (http://www.giverny.com) provided schedules, costs and a complete description of Claude Monet's house and garden, the latter the setting for many of his impressionistic paintings. When I wanted to find out what we should do while in Interlaken, I searched for everything I could find on the Bernese Oberland-Jungfrau Region -- sightseeing trams to mountaintop viewpoints, narrow gauge trains, day hikes, lake steamers, etc. One web page called "Traveling with Ed and Julie" (http://www.TWEnJ.net/bovisit.htm) led to a wealth of information and was extremely helpful in planning our three days in that area. I even found a page with 'LiveAudio' sounds of yodeling, Swiss cowbells and Alpine horns (http://www.wengen.com/sights.html). I ended up bookmarking the URLs (the internet addresses) for almost 140 different web pages. (By bookmarking them in Netscape I could easily go back to them.) Probably half of the web pages were found directly from searches with AltaVista and the other half by 'hot links' from related web pages. Considering that many of the 140 web pages were actually multiple pages, I probably looked at somewhere between 200 and 300 pages -- plus all those that had nothing useful. In the end almost everything went exactly as planned. Every hotel and car reservation was waiting for us. We ended up on almost every train I planned to ride, only deviating in two or three instances. Only one train schedule from the internet had an error and that was easily corrected. Using mostly printed train schedules from the web pages we never missed a train -- and we rode 37 in all, some with connections as short as five minutes. The hotels and B&Bs were all good or better -- no dumps. And I think only London and Rothenburg were over my $100/per night guideline. Most of the B&Bs were in the $70-$80/night range. If there was a negative aspect to any of our accommodations it was the lack of space in a few. But it didn't really bother us since we usually left our room by 9:00 AM and often didn't get back until after 10:00 PM. The summer days were long -- particularly in Scotland where the sun set after 9:30 PM. The planning took a lot of time -- most of my evenings for about a month. Along the way there were some frustrating periods when I couldn't easily find what I was looking for. But in the end there was a certain amount of satisfaction seeing it all come together. Copyright © 1998 James E.
Lancaster, Ph.D Complete
Index of Ed and Julie's Questions about planning a similar
trip? Comments for the author? Dr. Jim Lancaster has traveled to the Orient, New Zealand, Europe and the Middle East and gives travel-related slide talks as one of his hobbies. His special interest is the history and archaeology of Jerusalem and he has given numerous presentations to groups in Southern California. Jim has his own web site - Travel, Trains and Archaeology - and invites you to stop by for a visit. He has a doctorate in engineering and has worked for over thirty years in the aerospace industry. He resides in Tustin, California. Would you like to add an article about your travel experiences in Europe? It's easy to do. Our
Favorites Trip Tips and Tools The Not-For-Profit Site For Your Travel Plans |