So after 2 weeks into our travels I thought it a good time to reflect and make a few observations that fellow travellers may benefit from in the future:
- Take time to work out what metro ticket you need to buy in Paris. We made a couple of mistakes which cost us money and time. We bought a ticket for all zones, when in hindsight we only needed a ticket for up to zone 3. We also bought what we thought was an all line ticket but it didn’t include the RER lines.
- Allow plenty of time to get to your travel departure points. Things do go wrong. We were going along the metro towards Gare de Lyon, and suddenly the train was evacuated as there was a problem at one of the stations ahead. We had no idea what to do and panicked that we might miss our connection to Lyon. Finally found some help, but it required two further metro journeys on 2 separate lines, but we still made our connection with 30 mins to spare.
- It’s good to use the public transport options, it’s cheap, reliable, good and fun.
- Use Airbnb and make sure to use the kitchen facilities. It will save you money and it’s fun to cook.
- Use OMIO to book train tickets in Europe. We’ve found the website and app easy to use.
- Also book a guided walking tour for the cities you plan to visit and try and do this on day 1 of your trip so that you can learn as much as possible so you can plan the rest of your trip. These can be arranged vis Airbnb and we also used a decent website and app called Get Your Guide.
- Book famous attractions well in advance , not last minute or you might miss out. The Prado museum in Madrid and the Alhambra in Granada are two examples.
- While in Portugal Elaine found a taxi service called Bolt a very similar service to Uber. You get a 50% discount on your first 2 journeys, so we used it to travel back from Cascais to Oriente station in Lisbon, only cost 20 euros and took about 45 mins. If we had gone the route we came on it would have been a 15 minute walk to the station with our cases, then 6 euros for a train to Lisbon from Cascais – 40 minute journey, and then a taxi to our departure station Oriente 15 euros and 20 mins. Got a right result there!
- We tried to stay as active as possible, mainly walking to as many places as possible. The first benefit is financial of course, the less you spend on taxis the more you have for other things, and of course it’s also good for your fitness. We calculated that we did 1,141,000 steps over the 11 weeks, about 15,000 per day, and we only put on 1 pound of weight each during our time away.
- We took a guided tour trip from Larnaca in Cyprus to Farmagusta and the abandoned city of Varosha. I do recommend this as a very worthwhile day out, but what we failed to consider is that Farmagusta is in Northern Cyprus which is outside the EU. We forgot to turn off our roaming feature on our phones, which cost us £108 in roaming charges for the day, ouch!!