I’ve always been a pretty good planner. Regardless of whether it was scheduling for a job or vacations for the family, I’ve been doing it long enough that a lot of it comes second nature to me. I learned how to plan vacations from my mom. Dad worked for the airlines from the time that I was 10 years old until he retired, so we were always flying somewhere. Prior to that, we would do road trips. I literally learned about researching hotels and destinations at my mother’s knee
(Of course, that was long before the internet. She did it the hard way, with maps and travel books from AAA, and LOTS of phone calls! The internet has made it so much easier, for the most part)
This past summer, I had to partially coordinate a trip to England. My son was asked to be on a team that was going for a week to train and play with Academy teams over there. Since we were going over early anyway, we figured that it would be a great opportunity to add some sightseeing as well.
Rule #1 of Travel: Always, and I mean ALWAYS, plan to get to your destination a day or two ahead of time if at all possible, especially if you are going on a tour or a cruise. It is worth an extra day or two in a hotel to take away the stress of worrying about whether you’ll miss the tour or ship due to airline snafus or other problems. Case in point, a large number of people on this tour last summer booked their flights to get there the day the tour started. Guess what? They were delayed. Guess what else? They missed the first training session. Totally not worth the aggravation and lost activity that was already paid for.
It wasn’t the easiest thing to plan. In the course of trying to decide what to do and where to go in England, we couldn’t figure out why everything was sold out or super expensive. We knew it wasn’t just the summer months, because natives generally go elsewhere. Further research (thank you internet) gave us the answer: the days we were looking to be in London early were the finals of Wimbledon. All of a sudden, everything made sense.
Obviously, getting out of the area was going to be the best bet. We didn’t really want to rent a car and drive if we could avoid it, so we started looking at options. My son mentioned Eurostar and the Chunnel, and wondered if we could go to Paris for a couple of days. So I researched, and found cheap tickets and a decent hotel. Paris it was. But not so fast; we couldn’t find a train back to London to make our tour. Why? Because of the tennis finals. Back to the drawing board. We went back and forth, around and around trying to agree on something.
Rule #2 of Travel: Never Give Up. No matter how many times you have looked at a website, or thought of and discarded an itinerary due to sold out transportation or high prices, keep going back. It’s like a roulette wheel. Keep spinning it, and it will eventually land where you want it to).
After spinning that wheel dozens of times, I saw that a train had been added to the Eurostar from Paris to London on the Saturday before the actual soccer tour started! Perseverance paid off!! Multiple days of surfing, e-mails, and even the old-fashioned phone calls finally landed us an itinerary.
We left Washington DC on Tuesday night, landed at London Heathrow Airport Wednesday morning. Took the Underground to St. Pancras Train Station (on the other side of London) to catch the Eurostar.
Rule #3 of Travel: Make the Most of Any Situation. You’re traveling for goodness sake. Enjoy it! We had nearly 7 hours to kill in St. Pancras because changing our Eurostar tickets (I had reserved them for early evening. See Rule #1) would have cost more than the tickets. We found a charcuterie pub with good beer and snacks, and got to talk with some interesting people.
After catching the Eurostar, we arrived in Paris around 10 pm Wednesday evening. Our hotel was not even a 10 minute walk from the Gare du Nord train station. We got to spend two full days in Paris before taking the train back to London on Saturday
(I won’t even get into the planning that went into the sightseeing, because who knew that the World Cup Semi Finals would involve both England AND France)
(Oh, and I forgotten that Bastille Day was the day we returned from Paris to England, so didn’t account for the influx of the countryside into Paris. But that’s another post for another time).
Had to get ourselves from St. Pancras back to a hotel out near Heathrow. Then had to get transportation from THAT hotel to Heathrow on Sunday morning to hook up with the tour. Stayed with the tour for the week. When the tour was over, we had to get ourselves from that hotel to a hotel we had booked in London for a few days before flying home on Tuesday morning.
Feeling tired just reading it? Good. Because tomorrow I’ll explain WHY I detailed that planning, and what it all means.
To be continued….
