Traveling my Way – How I planned a 2 week trip to Germany, Switzerland and Italy

 Part 1

Rosita and I recently went to Germany, Switzerland and Italy for 2 weeks last fall. I have decided to document this venture and if you are reading this you will be my Guinea Pig. I hope you enjoy it. I am going to publish the entire article in several different parts soon after the trip so you won’t have to wait long in case you do enjoy reading it. I am in the process of writing an article on how the planning went and how it worked out. I will also see how close I came to the budget I set up for this trip. But first here is a little disclaimer on my travel skills. I hope you enjoy this and please leave any comments on what you like and don’t like. If you have any suggestions please leave them here.

Disclaimer

I would like to point out first of all that I am not a professional travel agent. I am not giving advice or recommendations, I am simply reporting my processes and experiences and preferences. I have been to Europe twice and the second time I booked everything myself. The trip seemed to work out great for myself and Rosita. We have decided to go back to Europe and I have decided to document the planning process in hopes that I can make it easier for me to plan future trips and maybe someone will find it interesting. To book a trip to Europe requires a considerable amount of time researching. I enjoy this process and I learn a lot about the places I will be visiting. My wife does not enjoy this process as much so she lets me do all of the initial research and then I get her involved to make the final decisions. If this process is something you do not feel comfortable with you will probably be better off having someone book your trip for you. But for me I don’t like going on a total preplanned trip and I do not like to participate in tours. I am more of a fly by the seat of your pants guy but I like to know ahead of time where I am going to sleep and how I am going to get there. Most of the rest I like to figure out when I get there. Sometimes I have found that I have to go on tours to do things I want to do. For Instance when we decided we were going to Italy in 2015, there were 2 things that immediately came to mind that I wanted to see. The first was the Sistine Chapel and second was the Last Supper. Reading about the Vatican and finding out you could spend days looking at artwork intimidated me so I booked a 3 hour tour. Spending 30 minutes in the Sistine Chapel was well worth the 2 and a half hours of following a tour guide through a very packed Vatican. Our guide told us Twenty Five Thousand people visit The Vatican each day. If you cut this in half it would still be crowded. I don’t want to discourage going to visit the Vatican. Please keep in mind that it is very crowded but well worth it. I struggle with large crowds so it was a challenge for me but I made it out ok. As for as the Last Supper there is a web site that you can go to to get free tickets. Because of the limited number of tickets available I could never find a ticket. I then booked a 2 hour tour that included a visit to the Last Supper. About a month later I received an email telling me the tour had been cancelled. I started looking again and the shortest tour I could find that included the Last Supper was for 3 hours. I booked this one and was able to see it.

Budget

Unless you have unlimited funds and if you do you probably won’t be reading this because you will probably just hire someone to do it for you. Well anyway you will need to have a budget. I am trying to keep my total costs for our 15 night trip to Europe at $8,000. I have a little flexibility but not much. I will keep up with costs as I plan the trip and then take the trip so we can see how we do.

Next article will be Part 2 Planning the Trip

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