Yes ladies and gents - It's the FINAL COUNTDOWN!!! (do do DO do)
We have 1 week to go before we're crammed into tiny seats in a flying tube for the best part of a day, eating crappy food and trying not to get too grumpy with each other - and we can't wait!
As everyone does, we have been ticking off items on a list to make sure we haven't forgotten anything critical in our preparation to abandon our lives for an extended period to gallivant around Europe.
Imagine our delight when we realised that we still hadn't actually sorted out our train tickets which will get us from Belgium to France and from France to Germany....slightly critical considering we have our accommodation all booked and there was no allowance for NOT being on those trains on the right day.
We had actually tried to book these tickets much earlier, but at that time we were too early and we couldn't book tickets that far in advance - now we're at the opposite end of the spectrum because APPARENTLY - you have to have a paper ticket mailed to your address rather than printing out your own.
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| Our faces after we worked out how many days we had before we fly out.. |
2 days later an email arrives from PayPal....
Looks like our hero selected the wrong account and PayPal has gone into negative balance - by all appearances the payment hasn't gone through. But Not to Worry! PayPal will automatically try to process the payment again within 5 business days!
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| Houston we have a mother f%$#ing problem! |
Choosing to ignore that problem for a while, we focussed on getting from Paris to Munich and Munich to Frankfurt. We went for the Eurail pass option after visiting several frustrating train-booking websites and recalling some helpful advice from Nicky's Aunt Hazel. It actually worked out about $200 cheaper.
The Eurail.com site is one of those sites that looks really helpful, but actually makes it very hard to track down some critical information like "Once I have a Eurail Pass, how the hell do I book my reservations on the trains I want". This is the website http://www.eurail.com/ I challenge you to find that information in under 10 minutes.
In the end we worked it out, but of course, the passes have to be mailed to you - so we have chosen the "Super Fast, I'll Pay Anything" option to have the passes express delivered to my work, guaranteed within 3 business days. Nothing like pressure.
By happen-stance while seeing Nicky off to her course this morning I noticed a yellow express mail envelope lying in the grass, soaked in dew, just behind our mailbox - HUZZAH! Our rail tickets for the Bruges to Lille trip had arrived! (Thanks for the care and diligence Aussie Post!)
So PayPal had apparently honoured our payment even though there was a balance stuff-up. We're breathing slightly easier now!
By sheer coincidence I think, Nicky had sent an email to Rail Europe blasting them for abhorrent customer service after she tried several unsuccessful attempts to even get someone on the phone and the fact that we had no confirmation that payment had been received and that tickets were on their way. They were probably already lying in the grass at the front of our house at that point - oh well.
So we're feeling relatively back in control now and I'm busy downloading TomTom maps for Europe, using litres of ink printing out copies of documents and making sure everything is available on DropBox as well in case of emergency.
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| Not long now... |
Tick tock tick tock....
Cheers,
Brandon.
Loving the updates, and you haven't even left yet! I'll give that Eurail website a crack later, and see if I can beat you, but as an idea for offline navigation, mtrip travel guides come in the app store with all the stuff onboard for offline use. Maybe it is worth looking into if you haven't already sorted it all.
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