Our ultimate road trip
so far…
Last summer, my wife and I went on the trip of our lives - to date.
We went to London, Paris and Ireland., which from Hawaii is a haul.
It all began when my wife got notice that she had about 140,000 United Miles that were going to expire later that year. In the winter of 2012, we starting thinking about where we wanted to go. Initially we were planning a trip to the East Coast. My Dad is from Boston and my wife Ann has always wanted to spend some time in New York. I have no interest in New York, but wanted to explore the Boston area. My idea was to base ourselves in Botson and take the train to New York for a few days. Ann wanted to do the opposite. This discussion went on for weeks, when one evening Ann finally said enough with this, do you think we have enough miles to go all the way to Europe?
The next day we called United Air and all of the miles, plus $350 in additional miles would get us from Kona to London and back.
We tentatively booked it for June of 2012 and after clearing the dates with out respective employers confirmed it about a week later.
Now the fun, we had 14 days to fill and lot we wanted to see and do. Ann had London and Paris on her list and I wanted to see Ireland; we managed to get it all in. One Saturday last spring, we took my Mac to Starbucks, sat there and mapped out each day of the trip.
First we figured out where we were going, how we were getting there, then where we were going to stay. We chose to use public transport for most of the trip, but did rent a car in Ireland to get out of Dublin.
In London and Ireland we stayed at Travelodge, which had spartan accomodations, but all we needed was a shower, bed and wifi. They were clean, convenient and price was right. In Paris we stayed in a B&B right in the city. We also traveled with carry-ons only. With all of our moving around and using trains and the underground, we didn’t want to be lugging aroung big bags. This was a challenge, but worked out.
Here’s how it went. We flew into Heathrow, spent 2 nights in London, caught the train to Paris, spent 4 nights in Paris, flew to Dublin, spent 4 nights in Dublin and 2 in Cork, then caught the ferry back the England and the train back to London with 2 more nights there before flying home.
We saw everything we wanted for a first trip. All of the major London attractions, castles and a lot of pubs. We spend a morning in the Louvre (not near enough), went to the Eiffel Tower, walked the Champs, the Siene river and sat in many a cafe. We toured the Guinness brewery, the Jameson’s Distillery, Grafton Street and many more pubs.
We took in Football Matches from the Euro2012 championships in local pubs in all 4 cities. We also met some amazing people and some no so much so.
The one thing that challenged us was the weather, it rained and rained and rained, and it was a lot colder than we had planned for.
All in all, it was an amazing trip. To share the trip with friends and family, we used and app called Mobily Trip which tracked where we went using passive GPS. I added pictures and comments and our family could login to the website and follow our trip in almost realtime. Here the link to our vacation
We also packed a box of stuff we bought during the trip and mailed it home. It wasn’t cheap, but not having to lug that stuff to the airport and to plane trasfers was worth it. We bought an Oyster Card for London transit and pre-paid cards for the attractions we knew we wanted to see. We also got Paris and Dublin transit passees and pre-paid for everyting we could. Pre-paid debit card were very helpful, as debit card use is prevalent in the cities we visited.
For our next act, we’re planning to return the UK in September 2014, but this time stay put and go a layer deeper into London with a possible trip up to Scotland for a couple of days.
Things we learned: Get a prepaid phone with a local carrier. We were pretty much limited to wifi accessibility, which was worse than we were led to believe. We will also pack warmer and really try to go to less places, but see the ones we do go to deeper.
It’s a long way from Hawaii, but well worth the long flights.
Can’t wait till next fall.
Cheers