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!