Vacation Planning
So I’m a nerd.
Well, we knew that. More to the point, I’m a travel nerd. We discovered this in 2008/2009 when, thanks to a confluence of events, my friend and I had a two week window between her busy season and mine in order to take the backpacking trip we’d been dreaming about since high school. My friend is the organized one. She was the one that responsibly got her degree in accounting and went on to work at a big firm in Chicago in order to pay off her student loans, while I alternately froze and baked to death in the Hamptons for less than minimum wage and 90 hour workweeks, paying off two degrees that in no way will ever guarantee me a job anywhere.
But I had loads of time on my hands leading up to the trip and she had none, so organizing fell to me. And it was like opening Pandora’s box. I discovered an entirely online world of travel blogging and shoestring budgeting and Lonely Tree forums and ten thousand shiny things.
I’ve always had kind of an obsession with planning out the lives of my characters, and that’s just make believe. So when I discovered that I could do this-for real people!-and do things like create a budget that was nothing but fun stuff, I went a little nuts. I drove everybody in my life crazy while I chattered on and on about best ways to travel, how I should approach a city, what I could do to save money (standing in the pit to watch Romeo and Juliet at the theater, for example, which worked out even though we were exhausted and our feet were trying to murder us after a day of walking around things like Westminster Abbey). I get so excited and my brain goes off into ten thousand different directions trying to know everything I can do to be thrifty and yet still have an awesome trip.
Now I’m traveling with two other women, both of whom I’ve known for about six years now. We met because we were all German majors in college, on a trip to good old Deutschland. They both had the means to study/work abroad there, I’ve had to satisfy myself with two week trips. There are some issues we share when we travel together, but I’m doing my damndest to make sure there’s something for everybody in my planning. They’re both luddites of a sort. I say, let’s go on a trip, they go buy guide books. But that’s okay. We’ve maaaaybe got a fourth coming along, in an online friend of mine from Arizona, who loves to travel and seems really awesome.
Our trip is, right now, hopefully 10-14 days in Eastern Europe in October or September. I’ve done research on both Prague and Vienna, which are exciting destinations that I’ve seen in movies, TV shows (ugh), and the like. I haven’t done as much research into our third destination, which is Zagreb. Just some cursory looks to see what’s there (The Museum of Broken Relationships!) and the currency, that sort of thing.
I’ve applied for one of those bonus credit cards. The good thing is that it has no foreign transaction fees. The possibly frightening thing is that I have to spend $3k within 3 months and my budget no way accounts for that. I sent my parents a long email in which I made sure to be responsible (Pros and cons lists go far in making people think you’ve thought things through, when really, my imagination can just supply fifty things off the top of my head; they may or may not be true), asking if they’d be willing to use the credit card and pay toward it instead of their regular gas card. I’m sure they’re somewhere laughing at me because I’m in hyperactive travel mode, but I don’t care.
I really should write out a more realistic budget beyond these three months and try to figure out if I can possibly swing a trip to Atlanta at the end of August or if that’s a pipe dream. There’s also talk of a trip to California over the Christmas break to celebrate my grandma’s 75th birthday, and I’d love to do that because it means meeting quistie and mxpw (again), plus Cat and a couple of others.
Oh, yeah, and my sister’s getting married in May and my mom wants me to take off work beforehand. I also need to buy a flash before the wedding since her reception’s indoors and yep, I’m her photographer. Counting the ways this can go wrong in 3...2...
2013 looks like it’s going to be a busy year.
Well, we knew that. More to the point, I’m a travel nerd. We discovered this in 2008/2009 when, thanks to a confluence of events, my friend and I had a two week window between her busy season and mine in order to take the backpacking trip we’d been dreaming about since high school. My friend is the organized one. She was the one that responsibly got her degree in accounting and went on to work at a big firm in Chicago in order to pay off her student loans, while I alternately froze and baked to death in the Hamptons for less than minimum wage and 90 hour workweeks, paying off two degrees that in no way will ever guarantee me a job anywhere.
But I had loads of time on my hands leading up to the trip and she had none, so organizing fell to me. And it was like opening Pandora’s box. I discovered an entirely online world of travel blogging and shoestring budgeting and Lonely Tree forums and ten thousand shiny things.
I’ve always had kind of an obsession with planning out the lives of my characters, and that’s just make believe. So when I discovered that I could do this-for real people!-and do things like create a budget that was nothing but fun stuff, I went a little nuts. I drove everybody in my life crazy while I chattered on and on about best ways to travel, how I should approach a city, what I could do to save money (standing in the pit to watch Romeo and Juliet at the theater, for example, which worked out even though we were exhausted and our feet were trying to murder us after a day of walking around things like Westminster Abbey). I get so excited and my brain goes off into ten thousand different directions trying to know everything I can do to be thrifty and yet still have an awesome trip.
Now I’m traveling with two other women, both of whom I’ve known for about six years now. We met because we were all German majors in college, on a trip to good old Deutschland. They both had the means to study/work abroad there, I’ve had to satisfy myself with two week trips. There are some issues we share when we travel together, but I’m doing my damndest to make sure there’s something for everybody in my planning. They’re both luddites of a sort. I say, let’s go on a trip, they go buy guide books. But that’s okay. We’ve maaaaybe got a fourth coming along, in an online friend of mine from Arizona, who loves to travel and seems really awesome.
Our trip is, right now, hopefully 10-14 days in Eastern Europe in October or September. I’ve done research on both Prague and Vienna, which are exciting destinations that I’ve seen in movies, TV shows (ugh), and the like. I haven’t done as much research into our third destination, which is Zagreb. Just some cursory looks to see what’s there (The Museum of Broken Relationships!) and the currency, that sort of thing.
I’ve applied for one of those bonus credit cards. The good thing is that it has no foreign transaction fees. The possibly frightening thing is that I have to spend $3k within 3 months and my budget no way accounts for that. I sent my parents a long email in which I made sure to be responsible (Pros and cons lists go far in making people think you’ve thought things through, when really, my imagination can just supply fifty things off the top of my head; they may or may not be true), asking if they’d be willing to use the credit card and pay toward it instead of their regular gas card. I’m sure they’re somewhere laughing at me because I’m in hyperactive travel mode, but I don’t care.
I really should write out a more realistic budget beyond these three months and try to figure out if I can possibly swing a trip to Atlanta at the end of August or if that’s a pipe dream. There’s also talk of a trip to California over the Christmas break to celebrate my grandma’s 75th birthday, and I’d love to do that because it means meeting quistie and mxpw (again), plus Cat and a couple of others.
Oh, yeah, and my sister’s getting married in May and my mom wants me to take off work beforehand. I also need to buy a flash before the wedding since her reception’s indoors and yep, I’m her photographer. Counting the ways this can go wrong in 3...2...
2013 looks like it’s going to be a busy year.