Planning Trips

What my brain does..

I'm a planner..

Before I go anywhere I get directions to/from anywhere we want to go, and I make a list of things to do each day. And I'm currently in the process of planning my trip to Paris

Being in Europe in a way has taught me to be more relaxed with my plans. People just aren't as concerned with strict plans, I know many people who miss planes/trains or even buy plane tickets for the wrong days, and it just doesn't seem to be a big deal for anybody. American's are the only ones who show up at airports 2+ hours before our flights, and we're also the only ones who stress about having a "plan". I'm not exactly sure why that is, must have something to do with our high speed culture.

My first few trips went fairly smoothly. But of course, being in a foreign land traveling to other foreign lands I have made several planning errors and also wished I had panned better before going.

On my way back from Bergen for instance, I bought train tickets to return to Oslo for the night after I was on the train. Luckily train's are easy to just show up and buy tickets for so I just had to pay for a high priced last minute seat.

The next problem arose in Venice, though it wasn't completely our fault. The buses don't label the names of stops so we missed our stop and rode the bus to the end, then the bus driver kicked us off and told us to ask another bus driver. This driver was much nicer and actually stood up and waved to us when we were at our stop.

Easter Service

Like I mentioned in a previous post, in Rome we forgot to write down directions to our hostel. But thanks to technology Kyle came to our rescue. In this city is my first regret. We left Rome the day before Easter. And although I am not Catholic I would have loved to go to the huge public Easter service in the Vatican. It would have been amazing.

The reason we didn't have Easter in Rome was because we thought it would be fun to have it in Greece. However, that was another failed plan. Greece is Orthodox, which means their Easter is one week later than our Easter. So in the end, we didn't exactly have a Easter.

Grand National 2012

Finally, my most recent trip to London. Everything went smoothly, I only wish we could have spent one more day. On the Tube they give out free newspapers so, dorky me glad to see a newspaper in English, grabbed one and I found out that the Grand National was Saturday (the day we were leaving). The Grand National is like England's Kentucky Derby. It's a huge steeplechase race. (A steeplechase is basically a horse race with jumps). This would have been spectacular to see! But alas, I didn't find out about it until Friday and I already had my flight back to Norway.

Of course I can't complain too much, I have had some pretty amazing trips! If I could do it again though, I would have spent Easter in Rome, gone to another Italian city (Florence maybe) and then been in Greece for  their Easter. The events of these trips have made me very diligent in my planning for Paris. I've been researching festivals/events and anything else that may be happening so we don't miss anything. I'm also trying to learn a bit (tiny tiny bit) of French before Monday. For some reason I can't seem to remember any of the French we learned in 6th grade, every other Friday in our humanities class.. Hopefully I won't make too many "faux pas" on this next adventure

Au Revoir!