ch, ch, ch, changes….. to the travel plans
(part… 6? 7? I don’t even know anymore….In our never-ending series of uncategorizable posts…) As we accelerate down the runway towards our grand adventure – just about 7 months to go – I find that we are already making significant modifications to the travel plan. Weird, right? We learn new things and adapt our plans to accommodate this new knowledge? How bizarre….
Anyway, when I started mapping this thing out last year and budgeting and all that fluff and folderol I had it in my head that moving from country to country would be the biggest expense after accommodations so we should do it as infrequently as we could get away with. Tourist visits can be 90 days virtually everywhere so we could split the countries up into 3 parts and REALLY see the country. Like, for Panama, spend some time in Panama City, then spend some time around Coronado/Chame area then up to Boquete for a few weeks before removing on to Costa Rica to do a few weeks on the Pacific side then a few weeks in the interior then a few weeks at San Jose. Reasonable, right? Or for Croatia maybe a month in Zagreb, then a month near Split and finish up with a month in Dubrovnik.
That gives us the opportunity to really get to know every country we visit, lessens the chance of suffering from FOMO, and minimizes the country hopping expense…. All good…..
However, the reality is that once you get to a region it’s not that expensive to jump around. In the overall scheme of things, the cost to relocate from Zagreb to Split is only infinitesimally less than the cost of moving from Zagreb to, for example, Pisa, Italy or Ljubljana, Slovenia.
My initial budget allowed for $600 per month to be set aside for travel between countries because I was thinking in terms of expensive airline tickets every 90 days. The thing is, though – even the intercontinental tickets aren’t that expensive if you are flexible with your schedule and you strategize departure and destination points. And moving within Europe or within Latin America is nothing. Maybe $150 each at most. Zagreb to Pisa, for instance, is something like a 30 Euro bus fare to the coast, a 50 Euro ferry across the Adriatic and then another 30 Euro for the train across Italy. It’s all day and we’ll likely have to buy two meals en route but we were going to have two meals that day anyway.
The more I research and learn about Europe in particular, the more appealing the idea of making larger moves every 30 days becomes. I mean, we’re planning to do this for an absolute minimum of 2 years so maybe the first leg of our European adventure hits 30 days each in Croatia, Italy, Slovenia, England, Portugal, Montenegro and then next time around we hit different cities in some of those same countries.
30 days seems to be the magic number for affordable accommodations so I don’t see shortening that up but my original ‘90 days at a time’ plan is looking less interesting as time goes by.
Maybe that’s driven a little bit by FOMO? There are so many amazing places to see and I’m getting that ‘kid in a candy store’ feeling about it. I’ll bet that once we get out there and start really traveling we’ll change the plan again. And again. Because it’s OUR plan and we can do whatever we want with it.
I also find myself considering the order of visit based on what I am learning about the various destinations. You don’t necessarily plan around festivals and activities except when you do – like going to Dublin for St Patrick’s Day or to NOLA for Mardi Gras or Rio for Carnivale – but if you have no set schedule and you learn about something cool that you want to check out then you have the freedom to just reorder your plans. My ‘for instance’ in this case was a mention in a FB group about a Food Tour in Split, Croatia that sounded pretty cool. And then someone made a comment stating that it only runs May to October…. hmmmmm…… I had a plan that looked like being in Split in April…..
