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Sunday 29 April 2012

Shit just got real

Hello everyone!

So this weekend me and Sam went about sorting out a few things for our European tour. It's been very productive but at the same time very stressful, and now we really know what we're up against. It's like being an astronaut floating above earth. Everything looks beautiful. The distances between places seem tiny. There's no need to worry about money, travel or accommodation; you can just sit back and admire.

Well I hate to use the cliché, but we have certainly been brought back down to earth a bit.

Ok, I just read back what I've written so far and that sounds VERY DRAMATIC, it's actually not that bad. In fact, in some aspects things have been better than we imagined, but in others there have been some minor setbacks.

Firstly, the good news. We've booked our hostels for our first three nights in Madrid!!!!!!!! On our first night we will be staying at the Hostal Oliver, a hostel right in the centre of Madrid (the Puerta del Sol area) which is only 50m away from most of the main attractions in the city centre. It has only cost us about £30 for both of us for that night and has great facilities, including FREE WIFI!!! It has pretty decent reviews too. Here is the page for it on HostelWorld, the website we're using to look at hostels: http://www.hostelworld.com/hosteldetails.php/Hostal-Oliver/Madrid/26990?sc_sau=prfs&sc_pos=1

I also thought I'd try and add a picture on here seeing as I'm gonna have to get used to that while we're away! So here is a satellite image of Madrid city centre with our hostel marked:


Wow that was easy! That took me like 10 seconds!

Anyway, so we'll be staying there for the first night, and for the next two nights we will be staying at a hostel called University Club (LOL), which is also located very centrally. Its reviews are a bit worse and it looks a bit shabbier, but it will do. It cost us roughly the same as the other one, and it also has internet! For both of these hostels we're getting twin private rooms, just so that we know we'll be secure and also to ease ourselves into the process of staying in this type of accommodation. This is the link for University Club: http://www.hostelworld.com/hosteldetails.php/University-Club/Madrid/16662?sc_sau=prfs&sc_pos=20

You may be wondering why we didn't book Hostal Oliver for all three nights, and the reason is strange. For some reason, University Club was the only hostel that had rooms available for the second night (which is Friday 25th May). Everywhere else was fully booked for that night. We didn't know if it was just because people we coming to Madrid for the weekend or if there was some kind of event going on. But at least we found somewhere I suppose, we might have had to resort to being hobos on only the second night!

HostelWorld is a brilliant website, it's very easy to use and we'll be relying on it while we're out there. Sam has the app for it on his iPhone and it'll be very easy to manage all our bookings on it. We checked out hostels in some of the other places we're planning on visiting too, and it's all very positive. The prices are good, the hostels have good reviews... so in general, everything's fine on the accommodation front.

So here comes the bad news... our travel is FUUUUUUUUUUUCKED.

That was the simple way of putting it and the one that gave me the most satsifaction; the reality is that things are going to be a lot more complicated than we anticipated.

If you read my last post you'll know that we'll be travelling by train pretty much all of the time using our InterRail tickets. In fact, I'm going to quote my last blog post at this point: "We have InterRail tickets for the duration of our journey, meaning that we can travel ANYWHERE by train in Europe with just those tickets, so this is how we will be getting around."

LOL, it's funny how easy I made it seem. I also mentioned that for certain trains (specifically high speed trains,sleeper trains, trains crossing country borders and generally any trains in Spain and Italy) you have to reserve your seats before you travel, despite having the InterRail tickets. This didn't seem like much of a problem; all the websites that we looked on seemed to say that you could just turn up at the train station on the day, reserve your seats at the ticket office and then go.

Although this may be possible in some cases, this idea is looking increasingly unlikely. I checked out our journey between Spain and Italy on some train websites - I checked it about a month ago and I found a sleeper train going direct from Barcelona to Milan, which was perfect - however it's FULLY BOOKED.

My reaction: HOW CAN IT BE FULLY BOOKED?!?!?!?!?!?! THE TRAIN DOESN'T LEAVE FOR A MONTH AND A HALF! WHAT THE FUCK! WHAT KIND OF MOTHERFUCKER BOOKS A TRAIN THAT FAR IN ADVANCE?! D#DFGJEOKRGER#'GRLG[PFOGV[PEKVG[PEJAROPGJ!

After calming myself down, I researched other options. However, only one train company does direct trains between Spain and Italy, and all of the other options involved making about 7 or 8 changes in random stations in France, with overall journey times of about 24 hours. Ridiculous!

I got on the phone to Sam and we decided that rather than wasting a whole day on that part of our journey, we will stop off somewhere in the south of France. That way, we get to enjoy ourselves for half a day in France amongst the travelling, and we will just arrive in Italy a day later.

Throughout the weekend, the whole reservation situation with InterRail made us think a lot. What if we try to reserve trains when we're in Spain and Italy but they are all fully booked? How will we get around? We found out that it is possible to reserve some of our trains now and get our tickets in the post, but this completely went against the whole idea of getting an InterRail ticket. We wanted the freedom to travel when we want, on a whim if necessary, where we want and without worrying about missing trains, and yet if we reserved trains then we would be limiting ourselves.

So this has been the main decision we had to make: should we play it safe and make sure we go everywhere that we planned by booking now, or should we take our chances and keep our options open?

In the end we decided for the latter. We figured that for domestic trains (just those travelling within a country), they should be more frequent than international trains and therefore we should be able to reserve seats while we're there. Even if it means reserving seats for a train a few days before we get it rather than on the actual day, that still gives us much more freedom than booking them NOW. And anyway, whatever happens, we'll get by. We might have to take longer routes to places, we might have to stay in a place longer than we planned. We might even have to travel by another means of transport. In the end, we'll never be completely stuck. And if we do get in trouble, in Spain at least, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Spanish swear words that will see us through the toughest of times.

Here's me contemplating suicide after the train incident...



So that pretty much sums up the current situation! I don't even know how I've had the time to do all this shit amongst revision. I guess I'll update again soon, or the next time something goes wrong.

Oh my god, I've spent waaaaaay too long writing this blog. I SHOULD BE DOING REVISION. Fuck!

Jack - 29/04/12 - 21:30

Sunday 15 April 2012

Well this is interesting...

Right, so I've just set up this blog which I will be using for my European exploits coming up in just over a month, and I thought I better do a first post just to get things in motion.

First of all, welcome! If you have made it this far and you are actually reading this post, that at least shows some kind of interest in what I'm doing, which is pretty good news because when I'm in Europe I don't want to be searching helplessly for free wireless internet for nothing. In fact, seeing as the journey hasn't even begun yet, I would say that you are one of the more committed ones. Yes. I'm starting to like you already.

So the plan is this: me and my brother Sam are going to be visiting Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Austria over a period of 4-5 weeks, starting from 24th May when we will be flying out to Madrid. We have InterRail tickets for the duration of our journey, meaning that we can travel ANYWHERE by train in Europe with just those tickets, so this is how we will be getting around. We will probably also use trains as our accommodation some of the time by getting on sleeper trains, but apart from that we will be staying in campsites and hostels, and maybe the occasional cardboard box. We'll be getting the train back to England too: from Austria we'll make the long journey through Germany and France to the Eurotunnel where we can take advantage of our family connections to get back to England for £1 (The InterRail will not cover this). And then we catch up on sleep.

In terms of the places we're going to visit within the countries I've mentioned, we have a list of places we'd like to visit and for how long we want to stay there. But this list is VERY flexible. I don't think there's any place where we've said we're definitely going to spend a certain amount of days, and we've also budgeted extra days for randomly going off the beaten track and exploring some rural areas, for example. And for this reason, I'm a bit wary of copying out that list of places on here... I don't want people to think that we're going to go somewhere for certain and then be disappointed when we don't. Also I think it'll be more interesting for you guys because it'll be less predictable and you can follow the twists and turns that occur while we're travelling. And, to be honest, after a few days when we've lost all our stuff, missed last trains, got stung by evil European death-insects and been taken prisoner by lonely mountain dwellers, the list will probably go completely out of the window anyway.

Unfortunately, there are still a few things to sort out. Although InterRail tickets give you free passage on pretty much any train in Europe, some of the trains (high-speed trains and sleeper trains) need to be booked in advance. Me and Sam were meant to be sorting that out yesterday, but we got a bit distracted...throwing water balloons at people (long story that I cannot do justice to on here), so that still needs to be done. And neither of us have much time to get our shit together - Sam has ridiculous amounts of uni work and I have revision and then exams until 22nd May. We leave 2 days after my exams finish - not a very big window to do stuff, and one that will probably involve packing and last-minute craziness.

But we'll manage. Even without booking the trains before we leave we can probably still manage, it'll just take up more of our time while we're there.

People have been telling us all the shit that could go wrong while we're out there, and by now we have pretty much considered every possible occurrence. While, of course, we're going to try and make the trip as enjoyable and stress-free as we can, it's inevitable that something's going to go wrong at some point, and we've resigned ourselves to this fact. However, our travel agent who booked our flights has done similar backpacking-style trips, and he maintains that the times when things go wrong are the most memorable and give you the greatest experiences. So this is what we're focusing on rather than the pessimism from some quarters - whatever happens, this trip is going to be FUCKING AMAZING.

As for this blog, I may do a few more posts before we leave, but as I've said time will be a constraint. I will definitely mess around with the background/layout, I'll probably change the background image while I'm out there to a photo I'll have taken. While we're away, I will probably update the blog at least once for every day that we are in an area with internet access, which hopefully will be the vast majority of the days. There should be tons of photos and plenty of other stuff, and I expect I'll write a lot of random personal shit because I've never really done anything like this before, and I have to say it's PRETTY DAMN FUN. I've always considered/wanted to keep a journal or blog of some kind, but I've either not had enough time or my life hasn't been interesting enough to justify it.

So I'll update again soon, in the meantime it's work work work, but at least there is something really worth looking forward to at the end of it.

Jack - 15/04/12 - 02:55 (Yes, that's how much I got into this blog business...)