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This year’s Euro trip was slightly more intense than the one I took 3 years ago. Last time, I went to Paris, Venice, and Rome for 2 weeks. This time the destinations are:

• London (1 day)
• Paris (3 days)
• Amsterdam (3 days)
• Prague (3 days)
• Dublin (2 days)

Basically the whole planning of this trip started last February with the motivation of going to the 2008 Tennis French Open (Roland Garros). What is weird about Roland Garros is that the tickets are auctioned off on their official website. So you get entered in the lottery and then your results are announced in late April. The tournament starts in late May, early June.

Unfortunately if you wait until the tickets are announced, then book airfare, the cost would be super high since it is fairly close to June. We were pretty much forced to book airfare in March to get a decent price since June is a high travel season.

The next big question, is where to fly to, and how to get there. I began first looking at round trip tickets to Paris (CDG - Charles de Gaulle Airport) from LAX and they all had layovers in the US. Furthermore, doing a round trip to Paris forces you to come back to Paris which has a lot of dead travel time.

My colleague suggested I fly into London (LHR) and then take the Eurostar train to Paris. When I looked online, I found really cheap LAX to LHR routes so I booked that first. The times were perfect since the flight landed 7:40am London time where we could take the entire day to explore the city then head out to Paris. It beats waiting a couple hours in the US for some layover. I chose the train explicitly over flying to Paris because we would have to head back to LHR, fly into CDG, then take a train back into Paris. With the train, you land directly in the Paris city center.

So at this point, this takes us to Paris. The next question is how many days to spend there and where to go to next. If you go to www.ryanair.com, www.skyeurope.com, or www.easyjet.com you can see the routes all the cheap budget airlines fly. From Paris, the flight paths are sort of wacky. You can fly to Prague, Milan, but for some reason not to Amsterdam. After looking at the train routes, it was economical to take the train from Paris to Amsterdam. Based on that I decided to stay a couple days in Paris, then a couple days in Amsterdam.

Now that we are in Amsterdam, the question is where to go to next. When looking at the same budget airlines, skyeurope actually had dirt cheap fares to Prague. That would be next destination.

From Prague, there was a little bit of a dilemma. That was more or less supposed to be one of the last destinations, but Prague to LAX connections were super expensive, so I looked from Prague to other cities. We could fly back to Paris, but the problem there is Paris to LAX costs a lot of money. I noticed that Dublin to LAX was really cheap, and luckily there was a Prague to Dublin route, so I booked that route instead. So the last leg of the journey was PRG to DUB to LHR (London) to LAX.

So for this entire airfare booking legs, I had to first verify the entire routes, then book the tickets in that order. As you can tell it is quite complicated, but it gives you complete control over your bookings and where you want to go. Furthermore this route enabled us to visit 2 additional cities, namely London and Dublin because of connecting flights.

LUCKILY for us in April we found out that we did get selected from Roland Garros tickets. So mind you that we actually booked the airfare before the tennis tickets themselves which introduced an element of risk. I mean the worst case is we wouldn’t go, but going would make the trip a thousand times better. And indeed it did.

Essentials
Even on this second time around, I learned about some new essentials

• water pump - Ben brought a water pump filter where we could use tap water, pass it through a manual hand pump filter for our water bottles. This saved us a lot of time and a great deal of money
• Day pack - you must have a day pack
• Water bottle - a sturdy water bottle is a must
• Snack bars - throughout the day you’d be surprised how randomly hungry you get so having snack bars on hand is essential
• Tax VAT Exception Forms - I wish I knew this last time, but if you go shopping, you don’t have to pay tax on the goods. The reasoning behind this is since you are not a EU resident, you are not subject to the tax (which is like around 20%!). Every time you buy something, ask for a VAT Tax Exception Form and before you leave Europe, turn in your receipts and you will get tax money back.

Next post.. day one (London)

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