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Where To Stay & How To Travel

When we began planning our trip the first thing we did was decide how many days and nights we would be staying in each city. The best way to go about finding lodgings is to decide what your price range is. We are going to go for the cheap options. Hostels are usually refurbished buildings of differnt kinds that are opened to travelers from all over the world for a much cheaper price. In case you don't know how hostels work here is a short rundown...

Hostels offer cheap accomadations for travelers. There are a huge amount of hostels through out cities and towns in Europe but some of the best can be found on the Hohsteling International website. The hostels you find on this website must meet qualifications and so tend to be a little better then some others. In order to stay at many of these you must pay a one time registration fee that is good for a year. This often gives you a lower price then people with out the registration. Most of the Hosteling International sites offer free breakfast, which we found to be fantastic when traveling on a budget. It is possible to have your own room in some hostels but most place you in rooms with other travelers. I will say at first this is a little werid but all hostels offer lockers and have single sex accomadations, some even offer mixed sex lodgings.

Below are some of the hostels we stayed at in our travels along with some of the family we stayed with in Germany.

In order to get from country-to-country we used a few different types of transportation. When we were ready to leave Ireland we flew from Dublin to Manchester where we stayed with some firneds for a few days. We took a bus from Manchester to London. London is were we began to use our EuroRail tickets which we had purchased before we left for our trip. Here is how EuroRail works...

EuroRail offers a number of different choices for travel. You can buy tickets that last for a certian number of days in one country to a certain number of days in multiple countries. The countries you travel in must connect. You can not take a train through a country that is not included on your ticket. However, your EuroRail ticket also offers discounts on ferry transportation, which is how we got from Italy to Greece and Greece to Crete.

One of the biggest problems with traveling by train is that you have to wait to get your tickets and travel arrnagemnets. You can only plan for the next place you are going. As soon as we arrived in each city we immediately went to schedule tickets to our next destination. This can also throw off your travel days. On more then one occasion we were forced to leave a city early and arrive at the next early which sometime meant we had no where to stay. If this happened we would first check the hostel we already had reservations with to see if they had any free rooms. Many hostels often do have free rooms for this very reason, people do not show up on time or they must leave early. If they do not have any open rooms most will call around to other hostels to see if they have space. We had a lot of luck in this area and never had a problem finding a place to sleep.

Another suggestion for travel around each city is to buy a public transportation pass when you arrive. In many cities you can buy passes that last for a few days so pick the one that works best for you. This may be a little scary and/or intimidating but in the long run it will save you a lot of money. It is easy to find a map of all public transportation in each city and from there you just have to to pay attention to where you need to go. In our travels language was never a problem when taking public transportation and it can be a problem when taking taxis.

Useful Links

Hosteling International
Hostels.com
EuroRail
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