6/22/24 - Less than a week to go!

A long while ago in a galaxy not far away, my niece Brienna and nephew Matthew asked if we could go to Europe in the summer of 2024. I accepted the adventure and we started on the process of planning out the trip (well 2 of us did anyway.....Matthew phoned it in). 

My challenge to them was initially to produce the itinerary. I wanted them to participate in planning the trip so they know how it all works; maps, reservations, travel shenanigans.....

Homework #1 where do you want to go? I wanted them to choose what they felt was interesting and important for them to see. We capped our trip at 2 weeks - that was the only parameter. They came back with an initial list of sites including; France, Italy, Germany, Austria, and Poland. Hmmmm. I pulled up the map and asked if they planned on spending the two weeks travelling on trains. That is a lot of places and in each one you could spend 2 weeks and still not see all the things. Dial it back. 

Homework #2 where do you really want to go in the time allotted? Brienna and I looked over the maps and train routes and she came back with a  shortened list of France and Italy. Doable.

Homework #3 train routes specifics. How are we going to get to all these places and at what times? Brienna did a fantastic job mapping out the routes. I made one alteration changing the double loop through Milan not wanting to back track through any cities in our travels. Instead, I routed an alternative route through southern France to southern Italy along the coast. 

Homework #4 find hotels. This one was my task regrettably. Annoying thing about the online booking experience:  

        

    1. No easy way to communicate with the property during the booking process. One would think with technology it would be easy to chat (with a person) or call internationally. Nope. The chatbots don't even work 24/7 in Europe! This made it difficult to book the specifics for the number of beds I wanted with the rooms. 

    2. Advertisement whack a mole! Sheez, when you are on the site, there are so many upcharge clicks on the screen. It is easy to lose sight of what you are doing which I guess is the point. Beat you into click submission. 

    3. Room pictures. Who took these pictures? One of the hotel's picture was a random silver thing on the wall with nothing else. Why? I dunno. Must have been very important in selling that property space. 

    4. Chase is horrible. After spending hours making reservations, Chase decided to randomly reject one of the reservations. Score for the AI. Unbelievable. 

                    

Hoping the hotel got my message after I had to reupdate the card information. Lame. What's the point of having a credit card if you can't use it? UPDATE: Hotel emailed and confirmed it was fixed. Thank goodness. 😀

Now, it is less than 1 week to go before we go! I just finished booking hotels so I hope it all works out. So, far during the bookings I only received two spam calls from Vietnam and Russia. Got to love the world wide web. 

The itinerary:

Paris, France

Lyon, France

Nice, France

Florence, Italy

Rome, Italy

Milan, Italy

London, UK (hmmm, how did that get in there?)

Still on my to do list:

1. Figure out phone plans.

      Update: Phone plan complete - turns out I have an older plan (of course! can’t miss a chance at the upsell) so my plan does not include the countries I am visiting. However, for 50 bicks I can get a month pass which will allow me to use it for 1 month. The other plan is 30 for 10 days, it would be short by a couple of days. I just need to download the TMobile app and sign up a day in advance. 

2. Figure out any tours and advanced ticketing for things while we are there. 

3. Pack. 







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