Sweden has state holidays on Wednesday for Walpurgis Night and Thursday for the overlapping Labor Day and Kristi Himmelsfärds Dag (literally Christ flies to Heaven day, aka the Ascension). Since everybody would take vacation on Friday anyway, we get a freebie and the office is closed for what they call a "squeeze day." Squeeze day for a non-major holiday. Pretty rough, eh?
The educator in me was about to type a brief explanation of Walpurgis Night as it seems pretty interesting, but I decided to save myself the trouble and just link to Wikipedia.
Back to the five-day weekend, I decided it was time to plan a trip. I've been doing some research on traveling for a while, but keep running into one major roadblock...too many options. Miranda and I want to see all of Europe, but it's tough to pick where we should go first. Then there are other things...yeah we could go to Prague, but it would also be cool to take a week and see Prague, Bratislava and Budapest in the same trip. Same goes for Italy. Why go to just Rome when we want to see Florence and Milan as well? Amsterdam? It's so close to Brussels, and once you travel there and back, we just don't have enough time. All of the good single-city destinations are really expensive, and as of now we're hoping to stay within a decent budget.
Then there's the whole question of train vs. plane. It seems everyone in the U.S. has heard of Ryan Air. The problem is that even though flights are "cheap" or "free", taxes cost more than the tickets, and you have to pay extra for every little thing. And, their airport is ninety minutes south of town, and the bus ticket costs more than the plane ticket. By the time you add in the extra expenses and waste so much time getting to and waiting at the airport, then catch a bus or train from the destination airport into town, you might as well pay the extra money and take a more expensive flight from the good airport.
Trains don't have any of those hassles, we just don't know anything about train travel. So far it seems pretty expensive for single destination tickets, but that's only because we are trying to book last minute tickets.
Anyway, I just got some leads on sites similar to Travelocity and Orbitz, but focusing on inner-European travel instead. It only took me three weeks to find some good ones. Hopefully we'll have some good travel stories on Sunday!
5 comments:
oh... there are just too many options. Where ever will I go?? See the historic city of Prague, or go Skiing in Switzerland? Maybe I'll go see priceless art in Italy, or be a crazy soccer Hooligan in Germany.
Do you know how ridiculous that sounds to those of us who are in the midwest?... and the only coolest things we have that close are the Statue of Paul Bunyan and the Wisconsin Dells
Yeah, I'm obviously taking my location for granted. It seemed like a good topic at the time.
You obviously seem like you have things planned out wherever you land, so you might as well go where the wind takes you and look for a fire sale!! :-) Good Luck! I can't wait to read about it!
dudes: DO NOT miss prague, under any circumstances, while you are there. raise a staropramen for me. watch me get insanely jealous.
I lived and worked with two guys from Prague for a few months. They said the city was at its height around the 12th century. Having grown up in a country where nothing is older than a few hundred years...that is pretty darn awesome.
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