CoIIeen

Ok, so I know he's a planner. Fine, but we're backpacking across europe. Isn't half the fun getting lost, having to stay in a less than spotless hostel, and playing charades with locals to find the best entertainment in town? Considering I have no Europe experience, maybe I'm being naive? Is foregoing the strict itinerary/hotel reservations the first time an awful idea? I certainly don't want to spend ALL of my time being lost either. However, I dont think this will be the case? If anybody out there has been in a similiar situation, how can I put his mind at ease?

We're planning (ugh! that word again...) on traveling for 4-6 weeks starting around the middle of February (on a limited budget, about $6,000 for everything) - flying into Rome and out of Edinburgh. The places I would like to visit in between are: Siena, Lucerne, Paris, London, York, Hamilton, Isle of Mull

Any advice about anything would be much appreciated... especially how to get a good adventure/planning combo.

Kate_W

Luckily, both my fiancee and I were master planners, so organizing our honeymoon did not present any conflicts. You should have seen my excel spreadsheet ...

It should be easy enough to find a compromise solution that satisfies both of you. Here are a couple of suggestions.

a) Book a place to stay for one night (maybe two) on the first day you arrive in Europe, so that you can stumble to it in a jet-lagged state without having to worry too much about what you're doing. By the way, are you leaving for the honeymoon immediately after the wedding? You're going to be brain-dead zombies for a couple of days, so this is a good time to have something nailed down.

b) Let your fiance develop some tentative plans and options. This will allow him to fulfil his desire to research alternatives. It doesn't mean you're going to follow the plans; make sure he understands this. But it does mean that you can arrive in a city with a few suggestions for accommodations (either specific places or areas), and an idea of how to get from one place to the next. He can create a notebook with useful contact details, addresses and schedule information (so you don't have to scramble to figure out where to find the train to whereever it is you're going next). At least you've got some back-up.

c) Take turns being in charge, and each of you should let the other one be fully in charge when it is his or her turn. For example, you can take turns being responsible for: (a) navigating from the airport/train station to the hostel/hotel; (b) planning the day's excursions; (c) picking the restaurant or entertainment, etc.

d) Consider having a few key fixed points/plans in your itinerary, with some flexibility around them. For example, you'll have your starting point of course. But then you might find an exhibition or concert in a city you'd like to visit about 2 weeks after your arrival in Europe. Plan that part of your journey (e.g. book a better than usual accommodation option - for a treat, buy the concert tickets or at least find out how to get them, research sights to see in that city). But leave the days in between unplanned, so that you can decide how and when to move from point A to B open. This will also help you ensure that if there are a couple of must-see cities or events in your dream trip, you actually get to them.

d) While I don't think this will suit you, my husband and I divide up travel planning responsibilities. I'm responsible for hotels, flights and trains (I love researching these things). He's responsible for rental cars. He's also the official tour guide, in the sense that he's responsible for ensuring that we actually leave the hotel and engage in at least one activity per day (I'm sluggish and could end up lying around all day reading - or just shopping).

TobieT

From your question I'd say this is just as much a travel inquiry as it is a marital issue. As newlyweds you will discover marriage is all about compromise and seeing the other person's point of view...while still being able to maintain your own.

This is not about "putting his mind at ease" but rather finding ways to make this a wonderful trip for both of you. So....compromise.

Help plan some of the itinerary, let him do the research on places he's really like to stay and see, leaving days for the carefree type of travel you want. You both can make a list of your own "must sees" as you pour over travel guides together. Start with the big picture (major cities) and work your way down through general routes. For instance, if you're thinking of renting a car in Rome to tour around Siena and Tuscany, leave those sorts of details till the end.

A couple in their 20's I know just got back from 6 weeks doing what you've described from Spain to Ireland and found real difficulty finding hotels/hostels in places they wanted to stay at the drop of a hat. Everything was booked, and it meant travelling out of their way more than they anticipated. Money was tight and those episodes had a significant impact on their budget. Thankfully she has relatives in Budapest and Dublin that allowed them some time to relax and regroup....for free.

There is benefit to having plans and an itinerary that still leaves days to take you where your heart leads. Let this be the first way you discover how to do that together. It will be worth it.

rex

If it were not for these few words...

<<(on a limited budget, about $6,000 for everything)...>>

I might agree with your basic premise that...

<<Isn't half the fun getting lost, having to stay in a less than spotless hostel, and playing charades with locals to find the best entertainment in town?>>

But what if... with a modicum of planning, you could have <i>many</i> of your nights in a <i>charming</i> inn, just a half mile down the road from the &quot;less than spotless hostel&quot; - - and save money to boot!?

And with the exception of the elite few who have NO budget constraints... time IS money... for almost every young couple I know.

If you can have 90% of the enjoyment, relaxation and memories in TWENTY days (with some planning) that a plan-less FORTY days might provide you... you'll come home with more money in your pocket to start saving for that NEXT trip (and maybe a few more earning days, or paint the house days, or some equivalently &quot;profitable&quot; use of the &quot;other&quot; twenty days you decided to cut off this first trip).

I've said this before, and I'll say it again...

<font color="green">All the people who provide and receive advice on this forum will thank you for NOT making reservations in advance - - you won't be competing with &quot;us&quot; for the accommodations with the best locations, the best features and the best rates that &quot;we&quot; snarf up by making reservations in advance. We appreciate your settling for the places in the less ideal locations, with the crummier features, at the higher rates.</font>

And with most (or all) of your lodging planned, you'll be all the more free to go off on that unmarked road, get lost and &quot;play charades with the locals&quot;.

By the way... you don't say what countries you have in mind, but you did ask...

&lt;&lt;maybe I'm being naive?&gt;&gt;

Every ten words you learn in the language(s) of the place(s) you visit... will enhance your time there, more than you can begin to imagine...

...charades or not...

Best wishes,

Rex

ira

Hi C,

&gt;Isn't half the fun getting lost, having to stay in a less than spotless hostel, and playing charades with locals to find the best entertainment in town? &lt;

Not really. A few years later you can regale your friends with how you had to sleep in a haystack in the rain.

Your budget is very thin for 4 weeks.

Airfare will be about $1000.
Trains will be about 800
Hotels will be about 2800
Meals no less than $20 pp/day
1100
This leaves you only 300 for all other incidentals.

Have you considered doing three weeks slit between London (and UK) and Paris (and France)?

bighil

Hi - I am not an experience travel or board member either, but one of the things I found helpful on my honeymoon last spring, was to plan only certain things.

My husband has an interesting mix of needing things planned, and hating when things don't go as planned. So, we planned our hotels and travel to a from each city and but left all of our days open to do whatever we felt like. We walked out of our hotels with very little planned, but to walk around and take in as much as we could. This avoided the &quot;we're lost and late&quot; fights!

This said, we were also really flexible. When we arrived in one city and hated our hotel and got easily bored with the city, we called our hotel in the next city to see if we could arrive a day earlier. It worked out perfectly for us!

Even if you backpack around, it doesn't hurt to nail down where you are going to stay in each place, and how you are going to get there. You can always change things if you need to. You don't want you first trip as a married couple to be one big fight!

Good luck!

kleeblatt

Mid-February?
Backpacking?
Advantages: low tourist season
Disadvantages: you have to carry with you warm clothes, rain gear, a warm jacket and extra pairs of shoes for 6 weeks. That's a lot of weight on your back.

I'm all for backpacking but I would choose May-June or September-October for this type of trip.

CoIIeen

Kate, awesome suggestions, thanks! When I say newlywed, I mean a little less than a year. We already went on our honeymoon (to the cayman islands), and I think you might agree with me that a backpacking trip to europe is probably not a great relaxing post-wedding vacation.

Rex- Well, thanks for clueing me in. It's your fault then if I book the last room in all the gems.
I already speak fair spanish and have learned enough italian that I'll probably be able to get around. French is awful...how do they make those sounds?

Schuler- Is it not doable? I'd like to add that we're both experienced backpackers. We didnt just get caught up in the romantic idea of &quot;backpacking across europe.&quot; My hub and I pack several times every summer up to 6 miles/day with 40 and 30 lbs respectively. Still, will it be too much? Love some advice from anyone who's done it.

So I'm getting the general idea that making reservations every night IS going to save us a significant amount of time and money.
I'm not committing, but let's say we do book our lodging. Is our rough itinerary then feasible? Anybody have a better ballpark figure for the budget?

kleeblatt

Sorry Colleen,
I live in Switzerland and only take shorter trips. I just thought you should be aware of the weather situation that you might encounter.

rex

I'm going to expose my middle-age-man old fogey ignorance here... but what does it mean to &quot;backpack&quot; in Rome, Paris, London or Edinburgh?

You're not going to walk from any city to another, are you? How is it different from &quot;just traveling&quot;, with, say... a rollaboard, that I <i>pull</i> behind me? Is it a commitment to &quot;hike&quot; from your hotel to Termini? Can a backpacker take a taxi?

I understand what it means to backpack along the Appalachian Trail... but the Appian Way isn't a &quot;sleeping bag&quot; kind of place, for like, um... about the last 900 years.

Or maybe now... <i>I'm</i> being naive?

jules4je7

Colleen,

I hope you have a great trip -- My husband and I did a 3-week trip across Europe from London to Istanbul, and with budget hotels and all other expenses, I think we spent about $8,000 including airfare. I'd be hard pressed to see $6,000 going for 6 weeks.

As for the planning part -- I like Rick Steves recommendation (paraphrasing here) &quot;It's better to plan and build an itinerary, then you know what you're missing if you decide to blow it off.&quot;

Happy travels,

Jules

Worktowander

I'll be the voice of (semi) dissent.

You will be traveling in what is the low season in many of these places. I've done that, with reservations for only the first and last nights of my trips, with no problems finding lodging whatsoever.

Had I made reservations before the trip for every night, I would have paid more. Approaching an empty B&amp;B with cash in hand (figuratively) often gets you a better price than booking ahead. For example: One March we scored a gorgeous 3-star hotel in remote northern Ireland for 30 euro per person, per night, including breakfast - about what we had been paying for low-end B&amp;Bs. This was when the euro was about $1.10.

Why did we get such a deal? We were the only people in the hotel that night. The desk clerk was apparently afraid we'd head on down the road and he'd be out. We didn't bargain for that price - he offered it. And the card in our gorgeous room advertised it as normally about 250 euro per night.

Obviously you can't count on that kind of gem all the time, and it doesn't work so well in large cities. But in the off season, if you're willing to be adventurous (sounds like you are) and occasionally settle for less-than-perfect-but-good-enough, I think flying manually instead of flying by wire can save you money.

But as a previous poster said, it's really a good idea to book your first night or two to accommodate jet lag and your last night to make sure you get to the airport on time. Have a great trip!

Therese

My husband and I did something similar to this before we were married. We weren't backpacking and had rented a car for a month, but were otherwise on a very tight budget.

We traveled through France, Germany, and Denmark, visiting a few nights with friends but mostly just stopping when we felt like it. Because we mostly stopped in small places we had no trouble finding reasonable accomodations. The only thing I'd do differently in retrospect is to have planned our first night's accomodations.

I'm a planner but since we had so much time on that trip it wasn't an issue. I just wish I could get some more time like that somewhere down the line. I guess that's what retirement's for. ;-)

Clifton

Personally, I like a mix of styles. A fair percentage of forum users here are prone to heavy planning, and it does sort of make it fun as you gain some knowledge of where you're going as you plan.

However, for me, too much planning makes a trip (which I look at as my favorite leisure activity) too goal oriented. So, we tend to book a place to stay at the beginning and ending of a trip. We generally will move around a bit, so we might solidify the gaps so that if we'll be in a popular place that's hard to get last minute places, then we may book there too. In between, we often leave open. We rarely, if ever, plan out the activities within a city stay, but will have a list of possibilities. Then either we do some of the list, or we don't. It's rare that we do it all and rarer still that we've based our decisions around where we'll sleep. But everyone is different and mixing styles may help both of you have some experiences you find enjoyable. I guess I find a bit of romance in the &quot;road life&quot;, even if I'm not as adaptive as I used to be.

Rex, backpacking is a very common term and has been for as long as I remember. Definitions are what you make of them, I guess, but the way I see it, it's a travel style very the antithesis of SlowTrav but not necessarily in a negative way. A guy I know were comparing notes on Romania. I asked how he came to choose it. He'd been backpacking and met some people in Budapest who were going, so the next morning he decided he catch a train and tag along for a couple of weeks. That's backpacking. It's just the favored luggage of the travel style, but not really focused on what your clothes are in. Read the thorntree on lonelyplanet.com to see the mindset in action. Now me, I was more inclined to know that we were going to Romania before we left home. We did, however, pretty much wing it once we had a list of cities we were interested in and knew how we'd get around. Didn't make it to all of them and stayed in perfectly fine places along the way. So, sort of a style mix, I think. Not the choice to make though if specific lodging is a concern.

elaine

At this point I'd worry more about your budget for such a long trip, the planning vs lack of planning for a February trip may be less problematic.

I say book hotels for at least your very first night and your very last night. If you want to play it by ear the rest of the time that's your call
(or, your compromise call) but I'd rather figure out hotels and the basic logistics before I go than spend any time on it while I'm there, especially if I had a heavy pack on my back and a limited budget. The cheapest decent places can be fully booked well in advance, even in winter.
And I don't think it's just an age thing, even 20 years ago I didn't want a less-than-spotless hotel.

CoIIeen

worktowander-My original idea follows your comments about finding deals on the spot. I hoped such might be the case as it will be february/march
Clifton-sounds like a perfect trip to me! I love the backpacker dogma bit

So I think we'll definitely book our first city/last city accomodations before, and also a few days in Lucerne (we'll be there for fasnacht. I may be completely uncultured, but i think it's like mardi gras in switzerland?)

Since the hubs already budget spreadsheeting, are these numbers unreasonable:
about $3000 travel
$75/day lodging
60/day food
25/day misc

hunnym

You bring up a good point about booking your nights in Lucerne if you are there during any type of holiday. When I did my own backpacking tour of Europe years ago, I was burned by my lack of planning. I was in Vienna during some holiday and every hostel and hotel was full - I ended up literally on the street with some others I had met who were in a similar situation. That was uncomfortable and we were tired and cranky so it wasn't all that much fun after the novelty wore off.

I wouldn't try to impinge on your husband's planning TOO much. For a lot of people, planning is half the fun. A lot of folks here have given you some great ideas about how your different travel styles can work together.

Have a great time!

LadyOLeisure

It is easier to find inexpensive hotels or B&amp;Bs on the road (read, in small towns) but if you want to be confident your budget will hold up to include Paris and London, you should have either reservations for those cities, or a list of 3 or 4 hotels in your price range that you hope to stay in...and the Fodors/Frommers/Lonely Planet/Rick Steves research should confirm that the majority of those are NOT among their top budget recommendations.

I think you'll find a mix of planning and serendipity will work out just fine.

RaleighLaura

Colleen, this sounds so familiar. We didn't have a month, but when my husband and I went to Itay for 10 days, our planner/wanderer feud threatened to turn ugly. We compromised like this: we had our plane reservations because we flew free and points and had to take what we could get. I made the hotel reservations in advance for each night because of what others warned about- we were worried about paying too much for a dump when something lovely and affordable was right around the corner. And I was allowed to plan one &quot;visit&quot;- a museum, an area, a tour- whatever I wanted- per day. Other than that, we wandered. We went to the museum and then did whatever we felt like- including hopping a local bus to Siena out of Florence just because Florence felt really crowded that day, and eating dinner wherever we happened to be when we were hungry. It worked out really well. My husband liked having plenty of time to explore, and I liked knowing I'd catch the &quot;highlights&quot; and knowing where I'd sleep each night.
We did a little of the true wandering on our honeymoon trip out West. We flew into Vegas (we weren't married there, we just flew in after the wedding!), and rented a car. Then a week later, we had reservations at a hotel for the last night of our honeymoon in San Francisco, and a flight home. Other than that, were were footloose and fancy free. We had a ball. I wanted to see the Grand Canyon, so we did. He wanted to see L.A., and we did. We loved Monterrey so much that we stayed much longer than we planned. It was great!
I think you'll find that planning the places where you sleep and the major attractions, and letting the rest of it take care of itself will work.
Best wishes-
Laura

viaggio_sempre

Colleen - How about this for a compromise: This trip to Europe, you plan the heck out of it. From your experience on this trip, you can both decide what extra risks are worth the experience next time. It isn't like you won't have any experiences that are unexpected anyhow.

Therefore, the planner-half can plan and there will be surprises. It sounds like if it was your way, it would only be surprises, with no planning - no compromise there :-&quot;