As well as using this to record & remember my travels, I thought it might prove useful to anyone doing the same sort of thing, should they stumble across it, to see how I planned the trip. So partially to myself and partially to a big echoey black hole. .. Here goes (:
So me and Jack are going interrailing (my phone always tries to correct that to interracial) in a few days, I've finished my exams and am mostly focusing on organising and planning our 33 day long trip! It's taken many reshuffles and changes of plan to get to this point, so I thought I'd share my reasoning! Our current route looks like this:
Paris - Barcelona - Avignon - Marseille - Nice - Praia A Mare - Sorrento - Naples - Rome - Milan - Zurich - Bern - Interlaken - Budapest - Berlin - Amsterdam
Originally we started off with many more stops in mind, but research about train times and routes cut many of those out for us. We'll be taking overnight trains between Paris and Barcelona (Paris-Portbou is a much cheaper alternative and allows us to stop at the Dali museum on the way which is wonderful), Nice and Praia A Mare (the actual sleeper train leg is between Genoa and Maratea), Zurich and Budapest, Budapest and Berlin. Using raildude.com, which allows you to find any station and see which lines run to/from/through there, and bahn.com which has a basically complete timetable for the whole of Europe, we realised before it was too late that Croatia would be impractical :( and it was replaced by a few days travel free in the South of Italy, where we've booked into a beach front hostel called Onda Road.
The other website I found really useful was tripit.com, where you can basically plan a trip and put in lodging, rail journeys and costs and keep track of your planned movements, which helps when you're staying in like 20 different places and making loads of changes. I also used tripadvisor.com to find out more about what to do in different cities, hostelbookers.com for hostels and booking.com for alternatives when I couldn't find a hostel.
One of the main reasons I planned so much in advance was that I had no idea how much to save up and how much I would need for accommodation. Because I'm a student of French I wanted to spend a fair amount of time in France, and our route basically ended up tying us to the south of France which is beautiful but very expensive accommodation-wise. Therefore my advice would be to avoid this area unless it's a must see for you, or you can minimise your time there.
Italy was a must for me and the overnight train that took us right to the bottom straight away solved the problem of whether it was worth the time we'd have to spend travelling all the way down and back up again. I desperately wanted to do the Bernina Express route that crosses the Italian/Swiss border (it's a scenic train) so our next stop became Switzerland, which although notoriously expensive seemed beautiful and we'll be there for my 18th birthday, so it's lucky I'm a cheap date!
Zurich is a big transport hub, so we then were left with our options open. We initially wanted to go to Vienna, but we found Budapest more appealing for its quirkier attractions, such as the thermal baths. Naturally, Berlin and Amsterdam then followed, and we'll be flying home from Brussels in time for A-Level results day! :(
After adding up the accommodation costs, it should be somewhere around the £500 mark (although I'd stress its possible to do it for less, you'll see we've included plenty of beautiful and practical places), plus 400 for the pass. I'll have about £20-25 per day on top of that, and Jack will probably have more, but it depends how much of our budget will have to go on things we buy before we leave - small things like toiletries that add up.
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