Tag Archives: airlines

Catching Up and Moving On

Whew! It has been a race to the finish-line for the last few months — but we made it!

Any of you who read my other blog, Multiversal Musing, will know that we have been in prep mode for leaving Australia. We listed the beautiful little house that we had built the year before in June and then it took at least 4-6 weeks longer to sell than we had anticipated. So we ended up with our settlement and moving day being 2 weeks before Christmas. NOT exactly a good time of year to launch off from this country and still be able to find reasonable airfare!

Finding any ticket to Europe was getting to be quite a challenge and the costs were more than double what we would normally expect to pay for flights from Melbourne or Sydney to London. So I completely gave up, kept packing and organizing, and calmed the heck down about it all. Somehow I could feel in my bones that things were going to work out beautifully, even if we had to stay in Australia until mid-January to accomplish that.

Besides, there was SO MUCH to do. We decided to sell off all of our furniture and both cars as well as the lawn tractor and lots of miscellaneous ‘stuff’ so that we could get down to a teeny-tiny storage room that was smaller than our bedroom. And did we do it? Yes!!! We were still selling things a mere few days before departure, but we accomplished our goal and the sum total of our possessions is now approximately 12-13 cubic metres of boxes and bikes. And that is less than half of a shipping container.

I was sound asleep one night, dreaming of snowdrifts while actually trying to stay cool on a hot and sticky Australian night, when I had a physical sensation like someone knocking on a door in my head. My feet hit the floor, I opened my laptop, and I went back online for an airline search on Kayak and the solution presented itself. I had been reading the European newspapers and there were rumblings of rail strikes in France, Belgium, and England. And the weather was predicted to be as harsh and snowy as the winter of 2009-2010.

I changed my search field to flights to Amsterdam and there, on the ONE less expensive day between early December and early January, was our flight to Amsterdam on the Wednesday between Christmas and New Year. BOOKED — and I didn’t hesitate. But ooops! I had no place for us to stay — and we would be arriving on New Year’s Eve!

I quickly discovered that the hotels were fully booked except for the (yowsa!) €300 and up rooms and that is definitely not a part of our frugal travel mentality and weren’t really keen on staying at a noisy hostel.

Our favourite type of accommodation is a short term apartment or house rental because we enjoy cooking for ourselves and not eating in restaurants. We also appreciate having the option of sleeping late and not being awakened by a housekeeper trying to clean the hotel room. So off I went in search of a short term apartment and even those were almost fully booked. Persistence paid off when I heard back from one host at Roomarama who had a very reasonably priced apartment available for the full week. Again — BOOKED!

For our transportation from the Netherlands to England at the end of our one week Amsterdam visit, I chose to stay away from the airlines in case there was a repeat of the massive snowfalls that Europe had last winter. If you’ve watched the blizzard-conditions weather news for the last week, you’ll understand why I was overjoyed with that decision after-the-fact. The final elements clicked into place easily when I booked an overnight sailing on a Steena Sealink ship from Hook of Holland to the English coast in a darling little cabin.

There will be a stream of articles from this point forward covering everything from living-like-a-local ideas to transportation tips, reviews of hotels, restaurants, and suggestions for must-see places around the world.

And remember — frugal travel ideas will be our primary emphasis!

Travel Is More Fun On A Train Than A Plane

Ah travel — it sets my brain alight in the planning stages and sets my heart afire as it unfolds.

There are so many ways to make travel viable, enjoyable, and relaxing — but for me personally, rather none of that involves travelling via airplanes nowadays since I am not one of those gilded creatures with access to a private jet and Business Class is not an option for our budget. From overcrowded planes to overzealous ‘security’ measures to unexpected volcanic eruptions, for many of us travel by air has become either drudgery or dreaded or both.

During the week of Christmas, my husband and I took a much needed 5 days away from our normal life in a small village in Central Victoria in Australia. We travelled back to Melbourne, a marvelous city that we formerly lived in until we moved up here for a ‘tree change’ (in contrast to the oft-desired Australian dream of a ‘sea change’) and the entire trip was an exercise in relaxation and ease.

After driving for a half an hour, we parked in the free parking lot, took our 2 pieces of small rolling luggage plus one tote bag, and entered the gorgeous old 1800s-era Ballarat train station.

Within 15 minutes of our arrival and ticket purchase, one of the clean and very new V-Line trains pulled up and we walked quietly aboard in an unhurried manner and found our seats. We each pulled out the book that we planned to read on the short journey and a mere 10 minutes later we were pulling away from the station.

Our part of Victoria is perched up on the Great Dividing Range and Melbourne is hundreds of metres lower, right at the edge of the harbour which faces Tasmania, so the descent via train is an interesting contrast in landscapes — interesting, that is, until you get to the flat, flat, dead-boring-flat western edges of the Melbourne metro area. Things perk up a bit visually once you get to the outside rim of Melbourne and begin to enter via the suburbs and the gritty but tantalising old industrial district.

One and a half hours from Ballarat to Melbourne in complete comfort and we arrived right on time at the Southern Cross Station.

If you are even remotely a fan of contemporary architecture, this is a stunning building with swooping waves for a roofline and it definitely has the ‘Melbourne vibe.’ There were lots of grumbles when it was under construction about how well it would fit into the cityscape, but it has certainly succeeded beautifully.

Strolling straight out of the station on that summer afternoon and into the surprisingly mild temperatures outside, we walked a mere 2 blocks before we crossed onto Collins Street and hopped aboard one of the Metlink trams. Minutes later we stepped off and walked the 1 and 1/2 blocks to the loft apartment that I had reserved for the holidays.

For 5 wonderful days we lived a very urban lifestyle — walking everywhere we needed to go most of the time, catching the occasional tram for longer distances, and never once missing our car. We felt happier, healthier, and more alive and it was actually quite hard to come back home.

Not once did we feel pressured or rushed or harrassed and that certainly is a stark contrast to the unfolding news from the USA that their TSA employees are making conditions nightmarish for anyone trying to fly in or out of the USA. For us there was no standing in long lines to check in luggage, no security folks rifling through our cases, no walking through scanners or being bodily frisked, and NO being made to feel like a criminal when all you are trying to do is get from Point A to Point B.

There is a growing movement in Europe away from taking bare bones and cheap airlines to and from various countries and there is a huge surge in train travel once again. Much of this is due to the stresses of air travel and the absurd overreaction to every single security ‘incident’ that provides spurious justification for treating each passenger on a plane as if they were a potential terrorist. The other pressing concern is that it is now acknowledged that all of those cheap flights have contributed to the destruction of the global environment and train travel produces a much lower carbon footprint.

I consider this embrace of the slower, more scenic, and less stress-producing options to be an enlightened approach to travel and, disasters like the snow-related Eurostar fiasco notwithstanding, rail travel still retains the more gentle and civilised feel of times gone by.

Now — if they would just bring back inexpensive around-the-world passenger ships. Those lovely old-fashioned things had scheduled meals and gentle entertainment, but rather a lot of time was spent sitting in a deck chair quietly observing the ocean or tucked away in some cozy spot reading a book. About the only way to find that sort of travel today is in the scaled down comfort of the handful of cabins available on freighter ships that deliver containers full of goods to global ports.

Still dreaming though — still planning.

(NOTE: All photos courtesy of wikipedia except for the V-line photo from www.vline.com.au)
(NOTE: This article was originally posted on the 21st of December 2009 on my other blog, Multiversal Musing under the title “Travel Can Be Fun If You Stay OFF The Planes!”)