Monthly Archives: March 2013

SAVINGS on Europe to USA to Australia Via Euro-Trains, Multiple Planes, Cars, Amtrak & Long Haul Flights!–Part 2

Shall we call this next part Money Saving Tips For Travel? Sounds good — here goes!

Yesterday’s article listed the staggering amount of country to country travel we’re about to undertake over a 6 week period. And today’s article will share some of the sites and tips for saving money along with why we made some of the decisions regarding specific airlines or transportation options. The heavyweights cost-wise are the airline tickets and there is almost always some savings to be had on accommodations and trains and daily expenses for everything from food to museum entry.

The first thing I had to do was decide what order to do things in. Once I had a clear idea of where we wanted to go country-wise and in what order, then I could start with the ferry for the English Channel booking, then the land travel portions in Europe, and finally move onto the overseas flights. After that I’d book hotels and apartments along the way.

We are taking a P&O Ferry from Dover to Calais in northern France. So I googled Promo vouchers for P&O and scrolled through the list. You have to check carefully to make sure that the codes that you will be inserting at the check-out stage of your P&O Ferry ticket purchase are still valid. I saved £12.00 with one of those codes.

Now in the overall scheme of things, a £12 savings isn’t a lot and some people can’t be bothered looking up discount codes, vouchers, and promo codes. But stick with me through this article as you start to see how it all adds up!

We needed train tickets for 3 segments in Europe — (1) Caen to Paris, (2) Paris to Brussels, (3) the Eurostar from Brussels to London. By booking through Rail Europe inserting our actual ages into the fields where passenger information is filled in (shhh!), and combining it with whatever Special Rate is on that day, I got another £36 savings. Also, ALWAYS look at the opening page of each site for the current specials. Right now Rail Europe is running a 70% off special for certain routes and our Paris to Brussels segment qualified for that discount.

Next I needed to search for reasonably priced airline fares and although I was doing these bookings a month or more in advance of departure, fares sometimes disappear, literally disappear, from the computer screen right as you are doing a booking if there is a lot of demand for a particular route.

My first searches were through Kayak and then Opodo and I input the multiple cities and countries we were travelling to. The choices were less than optimum and there were far too many connecting flights. Air travel is our LEAST favorite aspect of travelling since we travel in Economy seats and can never really get comfortable — so direct flights from point to point with no layovers is always our optimum choice. However, that kind of travel sometimes costs quite a lot more. I was crossing my fingers that I would be able to find a way around that!

Next I went to Airtreks since I had booked with them in the past quite successfully. They did offer a much better price than Kayak or Opodo, but they also included far too many stopovers. I really didn’t want to leave London and then stop in Dublin, New York, and Chicago on my way to Cincinnati! Then on the way to Australia, their only choices all departed from Seattle and had a multi-hour layover in either San Francisco or Los Angeles. That was adding hours and hours to our voyages in each segment AND the idea of having that many ‘encounters’ with the TSA in the United States was certainly not appealing! There had to be another way.

By looking at the map and thinking about where ELSE I could come into the USA from England and not be changing planes within that country, I decided to see what Canadian city was closest to Cincinnati — and that is when it all started to come together beautifully! The best international airfare from London to Toronto was with Icelandair. The flights went via a 2 hour layover in Reykjavik (so no, we won’t be seeing much of Iceland!), but it landed at a civilized dinnertime hour in Toronto and we could spend a night there and recover a bit before flying the tiny 1-1/2 hour journey on Air Canada to Cincinnati. Hooray!

Icelandair wasn’t running any specials, but Air Canada has a link right at the top of their opening page that says SPECIAL OFFERS and we saved a few £££s by going through that link, too.

I knew that Air Canada did direct non-stop flights from Vancouver to Sydney, but when I checked on that option the prices were an eye-watering £3,113 or $4,705 US dollars for the two of us going ONE WAY. The prices at Cathay Pacific were almost identical. Wow! That certainly didn’t fit into my goal of budget travel!

The L-O-N-G flight to Australia over LOTS of water!

I was beginning to think that we were going to have to just grin and bear it and deal with airplane transfers and long, long waits in California, but my final stop was a return trip to BootsnAll and a run-through with their online airfare search-and-map called “indie Multi Country Flight Finder.” What a serendipitous visit that was! Just as I was looking at possibility after possibility from either Seattle or Vancouver into either Sydney or Melbourne, a little chat screen popped up on the lower right-hand side and someone on the other end asked if there was anything they could do to help.

I typed in a response and told them that we were trying to get home to Australia without a 6 hour layover in California and I could not afford the costs with Air Canada or Cathay Pacific. A simply lovely man named Chris Heidrich at BootsnAll then sent me an email with a link to a flight that was the answer to all of our needs — a practically direct flight from Vancouver to Sydney with a tiny 2 hour layover in Auckland (in the early dawn hours — groan!) AND at the simply amazing cost that they offered for BOTH of us in US dollars saved us over $3,000!!!

That was a stunning success and I certainly recommend the folks at BootsnAll for not only excellent prices but excellent customer service. Each and every time I have had one more question, someone gets back to me in a very short time. The most I have ever waited for a response was about an hour-ish, certainly not hours and hours or days for feedback and answers.

In the next article that I post sometime between tomorrow and Tuesday, I will share how to save money on the hotels, apartments and other bits of transportation in various countries. And for travellers from countries outside of the USA who wish to go from coast to coast, I’ll share some important details of how and why each form of transportation might affect your journey.

I’ll also give you a list of all of the savings that I made with discount codes, vouchers, and promo specials. They all added up quite nicely — so stay tuned!

Europe to USA to Australia Via Euro-Trains, Multiple Planes, Cars, Amtrak & Long Haul Flights!–Part 1

Whew — that’s a huge relief! I’ve been having a Planes, Trains, and Boats moment, but with a few exceptions, the ferry tickets, train tickets, and plane tickets for our around the world adventure from the UK to France to Belgium to the UK to Iceland to Canada to the USA and across from side-to-side, back to Canada and on to Australia to are all booked except for a tiny train trip from Washington State to Vancouver and an in-country flight from Sydney to Melbourne.

Tea-stained and crossed-through planning notebook for our marathon Europe to UK to Canada to USA to Australia trip!

I am exhausted and you will soon understand why. For the last 3 straight days I’ve been dealing with website after website since I needed to be saving money everywhere! This trip is costing us a fortune because (a) the round-the-world distances between countries are simply huge and (b) the USA itself is SO BIG and the relatives over there are scattered on both sides of the country. I’ll detail it all a bit so you can see how to save money on these huge trips as long as you are willing to do the legwork, take advantage of every promo code or discount voucher online that you can find, and sit still for days whilst inputting the same information again and again and again. (sigh!)

Here’s the final schedule.

1. Return from Newcastle to Norfolk on 27 March.
2. Shipping company picks up our household goods in Norwich on 30 March and we vacate our storage unit.
3. Spend a few last days with the family here and then head to Dover on the 4th of April for a ferry to France.
4. Spend several days in Normandy with our darling friend Polly and her two daughters. Polly knows our lovely little van and has purchased it from us for her own business and we are happy to deliver it to her and spend some quality time with that charming family.
5. Leave Normandy via Caen on the 10th of April on an express train to Paris for a 2-1/2 day getaway.
6. Leave Paris on a Thalys train for Brussels on the 13th of April for another 2-1/2 day getaway.
7. Leave Brussels on 16th of April on the afternoon Eurostar to London and spend the night in a hotel near Heathrow Airport.
8. Fly from London on the 17th of April to Toronto on Icelandair via a 2 hour layover in Reykjavik. (guess we won’t be seeing much of it!) Overnight in Toronto.
9. Fly from Toronto to Cincinnati on the 18th of April via Air Canada and my daughter Jennifer will drive up from Louisville and pick us up.
10.7-plus days from 19th through 26th of April in Louisville, Kentucky with my daughter Jennifer and her family.
11.Dropped back in Cincinnati on the Friday the 26th of April just before midnight for a 1:23 AM (groan!) 27th April departure by Amtrak for Chicago. And yes, we have a sleeping car for the almost 10 hour journey!
12. Arrive Chicago at 10:05 AM on Saturday the 27th of April and depart again at 2:15 PM for 46 hours on the Amtrak ‘Empire Builder’ to Portland, Oregon. Yes, another cabin of our own to relax in.
13. Arrive Portland on at 10 AM on Monday the 29th of April, have a 2 hour layover, then depart for Tacoma, Washington arriving just before 3 in the afternoon and my son Christopher will pick us up at the station.
14. 7-plus days from 29th of April through 6th of May with Christopher and his family in Tacoma.
15. Depart from Tacoma Amtrak station on 7th of May for Vancouver where we will overnight in the city prior to flying out the next evening.
16. Fly from Vancouver on the 8th of May via Air New Zealand.
17. Arrive in Sydney at 8:30 AM on the 10th of May.
18. 10th of May onward still being planned!

Now do you see why I am tired? There are so many segments to this trip and by some clever juggling and using multiple airlines and discounts, I have saved thousands of £££s off what I would have paid through a standard booking site or even a multiple-carrier-checker like Kayak or Opodo. AND I had to book apartments in Paris and Brussels and hotel rooms for the overnights in London, Toronto, and Vancouver.

May I just say it again — whew!!!

My next post will give you some money saving tips for everything from plane flights to accommodation to train travel and will include links to ALL of those fabbo sites that saved us money. When you are in THIS MANY COUNTRIES in a 6 week period, saving money is essential!

Stay tuned….

Ping-Ponging? Nope! Happily Back To Australia!

Have you ever heard the term ‘Ping Pong Poms’ and do you know the origin? It refers to people from Great Britain, commonly referred to around the world as ‘Poms’, who move to Australia for a new life and ping-pong right back to the UK because they find that it’s too much of a change for them or that Australia isn’t British enough for their tastes. They usually return to the northern hemisphere within 12 months or less.

So, in our own case, if we moved whole-heartedly to Europe from Australia over 2 years ago and, in spite of that previous commitment to a European life, are now returning to Australia — does that make us Ping Pong Aussies? Actually no — it’s a very happy choice and we are getting more and more excited with each day at this point.

I consider myself to be a boots-on-the-ground documentarian of the places and social conditions where we are living. Although I sometimes report on the glossy travelogue version of Europe, at other times you will read my take on the current day-to-day facts about Europe.

The reasons we came to this side of the world and that we love it here are all still valid — the visual beauty, the greenness, the history, the architecture. But it’s quite clear that Europe, including the UK, is unravelling financially and unless you are in banking, medicine, or property sales — if there is no way to make a decent living, you’d be in trouble in no time. We just spoke to a building contractor here in Newcastle about an hour ago and he said that 8-10 years ago he made 3-1/2 times what he does now each month. If we ever DO want to retire, we have to be sensible and go back to a place where we can start building the accounts back up, not continue to deplete them. We actually feel very blessed to HAVE options when so many people are trying to LEAVE the UK and emigrate to Australia or New Zealand. There are several television shows over here about how to do that!

France would have been our happy-heart choice here in Europe, but the tax changes and pension changes just blew that out of the water for us. There is simply no work here in the UK and even the people with jobs all feel quite insecure.

I was relieved to leave Australia in 2010 — I won’t lie about that — but not because I didn’t love it there. I wouldn’t have bothered getting Australian citizenship if I hadn’t truly loved that country and I would have just carried on being a legal resident the way I was in France. The rural lifestyle just wore us both out. It was much too much in a way that neither of us could have anticipated before we tried it. But gosh — we did love all of the people we met out there in Central Victoria who are now life-long friends to know as we get older.

I am glad that I never-ever departed from Australia with negative feelings about it because, after having a bit of a think about it and getting our heads wrapped around it, we have both realised that neither of us is having ANY issues with moving back in the end. And isn’t THAT a nice surprise! It’s as if going away has given us a better appreciation for the country and made us understand that it’s still a darned good lifestyle in Australia compared the austerity of Europe and the UK and the dreadful financial mess that is ever-present in the USA.

The best part of Australia to me is the part that is the most European — Melbourne! So Mark has agreed that even if we live in a shoebox sized house, he’ll do city living (thank God because I had enough of snakes, bushfires, and heat in the countryside the last time!), join a city cycling club, and let us have the freedom of just walking out the door and catch a tram to the market, a club, a museum, a cafe. He always turned up his nose at the idea of a more centralised city lifestyle in Melbourne or even when we were visiting Sydney but thankfully that has changed. Maybe we’ll eventually have a weekend cottage in the country? Maybe not. We’ll see.

Once we were actually on this side of the world, Mark finally got into the groove of that urban lifestyle choice in places like Berlin and Amsterdam and London. Those two months in London in 2011 showed him that cycling in the city can be quite interesting and visually stimulating in a different way to the bleached brown rolling hills of Victoria, Australia. When we actually lived full time in St. Girons in the south of France, he finally had his eyes opened to how cool it was to have your own wee manageable space in your home, but then the greater world of entertainment was right on your doorstep — literally — instead of it being a long and boring DRIVE to get to anything.

Our life in St. Girons has set the template for what we want to go back and find in Melbourne. But we wouldn’t have know THAT either unless we had left Australia for awhile.

So to answer the questions that have trickled in about how I REALLY feel about moving back to Australia and are we both happy about it –it’s all good, we’re fine with our decision, and as much as it seems like a shockingly abrupt turn-around to some people, we will not only manage, we will thrive! Mark is quite calm about moving back, I am quite calm about it, and we will relish every minute of this little 2-1/2 year adventure and know that it was the right thing to do AT THE TIME that we did it. Now it is the right time to go back.

Next up? The list making, re-packing, staging, reservations-making, booking of moving companies, and then getting ON THE PLANE. Wheeee!!!

So Where Is Home After Years Of Travel? A Very Familiar Place!

You know that sensation of beating your head against a wall? Of believing utterly in manifesting the life that you want into reality — but none of the tried and true methods that have always worked in the past are now producing any results?

I’ve always known that no matter how much I might attempt to will something into being, if it was not meant to be, it would not appear. All of my efforts would be a complete waste of time if the Universe had other plans for me — for us. And being stubborn or petulant was utterly futile and a complete waste of time and energy.

In spite of being oh-so-ill this week, I have continued to pump out CVs and cover letters for Mark’s job search — 70 applications in less than 5 weeks. But some hard truths are now completely clear. There are far too many people looking for work in the UK and far too few jobs, so potential employers don’t even give you the courtesy of a form letter email to acknowledge that they have received your application. Even people as multi-talented as Mark are all competing for the same small number of jobs at simply shocking wages.

We’ve heard from friends here in Newcastle that this has only been the case in the last 10 years and previously tradesmen could make a very good living at wages that were comparable to those paid in Australia. That certainly is not the case now and the numbers of people that are living right on the edge of abject poverty is simply shocking. I’m not going to engage in any sort of lengthy statement about the wisdom or lack thereof of allowing hundreds of thousands of immigrants to come into this small island nation and drive the wages down-down-down to mimimum wage or LESS in a mere decade, but the situation is going to get even worse at the end of this year when another unrestricted flow will be allowed from two new Eastern European countries.

So why beat ourselves up about it? We haven’t failed in any way, our adventure in Europe for the past 2 & 1/2 years has been wonderful, and we feel blessed to have seen so many places and experienced so many countries. We aren’t 20-somethings and we have to be sensible about economics and long term plans, so after a major re-think on where to go next, we’ve made a surprisingly happy decision to go home to Australia.

You’re going to be getting an interesting mix of travel posts and photos and planning-staging-moving posts from this point onward. We have to get back to Norfolk in a few weeks to organise what to ship back to Australia. Then we’ll do a wee bit more travelling in countries outside the UK, we’ll sell our left-hand-drive car, and then there will be a series of journeys via plane (my least enjoyable kind of travel!) as we hop, skip, and jump our way back.

Look out, Australia — here we come!

Noro or Gastro or Whatever-ro, Please Go Away!

4 March 2013
We had the most wonderful day out on Saturday in Newcastle Upon Tyne. It was one of those perfect days with bright Spring sunshine that just lifts your spirits no matter how cool the temperature is. And yes, I took lots of wonderful photos.

However — within hours after arriving home, my stomach was in chaos and was beginning to get very, very ill. I’m now on Day Three of this and trust me, I’m not having a good time right now.

And what IS it about my ‘link up’ with the Royal Family? Last year I was in the hospital in France with kidney problems at the exact same time as Prince Phillip. This time I’m unwell at the same time that Her Majesty has gastro and is in the hospital. Not a particularly good connection!

Hopefully I will bounce back in the next few days and be able to upload some photos and information. Wish me well!

UPDATE: 6 March 2013
In response to quite a few queries about how I am feeling, I’m not happy — really not happy to report that I am still flat as a pancake in bed whenever I am not racing off to the bathroom. Oy! The up-and-down body temperature is also quite distressing.

Apparently the hospitals here in the UK have been so deluged with people with the same symptoms that they ask you to stay home and suffer through it until you have reached the full 4 day mark. That won’t actually arrive until almost midnight tonight. (groan!) I’m following all of the advice and staying hydrated even when sipping a glass of water or a cup of peppermint tea gives me a massive stomach ache. Mark made an off the cuff remark a couple of days ago that this is really NOT an optimum weight loss program!

Speaking of the marvelous Mark, he is being an absolute saint as he ferries cups of tea up the stairs in between demolishing the kitchen downstairs and those middle of the night bear hugs are certainly welcome when I am shivering with chills. Bless him, he’s a treasure. Apparently he suffered through this same level of sickness about 20 years ago in Morocco and he remembers it vividly to this day. It took him a week to get over this first stage and then he was wobbly for weeks afterward, so he’s been very dear and sympathetic.

Thanks for the notes full of kind thoughts and good wishes. They are certainly appreciated.

A Wanderful Life

The Neverending Journey

Monthly Archives: March 2013

Europe to USA to Australia Via Euro-Trains, Multiple Planes, Cars, Amtrak & Long Haul Flights!–Part 1

So Where Is Home After Years Of Travel? A Very Familiar Place!

Noro or Gastro or Whatever-ro, Please Go Away!