I had a big birthday last year...no, I will not mention which one...and, I had said I was going to go on a trip to celebrate, or commiserate, whichever you choose. It did not seem like it would happen but it did. I finally took the time and the money and I went for vacation.Since I am a writer I thought I would take this trip and write about it as well. In many ways this was like writing a novel. You start with an idea and you outline out the idea until you finally sit down and put pen to paper, or in modern times open up that word document and start to put those ideas down in words. When planning a vacation there is only one idea that you need to start...
Where are we to go?
I had several choices. I could make this a more exotic trip and go outside of my element by visiting Israel or Turkey or even Romania. I could go traditional and visit London or Paris which is one of my absolute favorite places to visit. It also gives me a chance to speak my beloved French. We could do tropical and go to an island. We could do historical and go, well anywhere really. We could pick a location in the US like Alaska or Hawaii that we have never been. So of course, if you knew me at all, you know I started to plan by making a list of all of the cities and places I would have loved to have visited. My list looked a little like this:
London/France
London/Ireland/Scotland
Israel
Bulgaria/Romania
Iceland
Cuba (Just Kidding! LOL)
Thailand
Greece
Egypt
There are so many places to visit on the map. I lived in Avignon, France at one point in my life and got to visit many places in France while there including Paris, as well as Italy, Germany and Austria. Unfortunately, I ran out of money to go anywhere else. Plus, that was many moons ago. Seeing those places I had visited again would be like seeing them for the first time after so much time had passed. The decision was finally made and we decided to visit...drum roll please...London and Paris. I checked ticket prices, which is very easy now with all the site comparisons that are done online. We selected to fly Aeroflot and save a bit of money on the airline versus the hotel. I had never heard of Aeroflot prior to this trip. It had the best prices though. I learned it was a Russian airline and the lower prices also came with a long, 10.5 hour layover
Oh this was going to be exciting...of course that leads to the next question.
Where will we stay?
Although, the where will we stay question often can go hand in hand with What will we do? There where will we stay was harder to answer than the where will we go. In fact, it took me an entire day of looking through hotels and options to pick a London hotel and then another two full days to pick the Paris hotel. Picking a hotel should not be so simple that you just select the first nice picture you see. When traveling abroad it is often easier and cheaper if you pick a hotel that offers breakfast for example. Although, not many of those to see in my Paris list. I want a hair dryer and, believe it or not, air conditioning. Not every hotel has standard air conditioning like in the United States. You may want a gym or twin beds or a restaurant, or you want it in a certain area. Whatever your amenities and preferences are it is important to look through them, decided which are MUSTS and which are LIKES and then run a list and start parsing through it.
A piece of advice though, don't always take the reviews to heart but don't discredit them either. Some of the problems with finding a hotel is that people love to post their negative comments on the hotel and yet, you may have a wonderful time. They are good to read but scan them thoroughly to conclude which are still okay even though they do not offer the amenities you want. For me it became a daunting task of look at a hotel, like it, read the reviews, get scared. At one point, I walked around my office asking if anyone had suggestions for hotels in Paris or London. Each of the hotels I found came after great review and a decision that I finally found the right one...well, and I couldn't stand to look at another one and just made the decision.
Next up was deciding what we really wanted to see in those cities. We were not staying weeks with ample time to do everything. It was four days in London and three days in Paris. That is not really a lot of time but we managed to cram so much in just four days (more on that later though). We are not really travelers that plan out our whole itinerary down to the last minute. We are much more casual about our approach. There were certain places and monuments that were on our MUST list though which helped. We learned along the way to plan out our routes better based on what we wanted to see and where we wanted to go but I write this with a satisfied feeling that I got to see all the MUSTS of our trip.
More to come with Entry #2...Leaving for London
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