8 Weeks To Go

We are starting to feel the excitement build now. With only 8 weeks to go the past couple of months has seen a fair bit of activity happening with respect to the organising of this holiday and with the more activity going on, the more excited we seem to get. We have booked a fair chunk of the train travel with tickets purchased for the London to Edinburgh leg, the London to Paris leg on the Eurostar, the Paris to Brugge leg, the Brugge to Wurzburg leg and the Wurzburg to Salzburg leg. We still have the train rides to Switzerland and through Italy to go as well as the Glasgow to London leg. This leg is proving tougher than most. The London to Edinburgh leg cost us a total of £78 and that's for a 6 1/2 hour train ride. The Glasgow to London journey is virtually identical and the cheapest we can currently find this for is £229. So I'm holding off for the moment in the hope it will reduce in price but this means logging on to the dozen or so websites everyday and trudging through the various ticket booking systems. But for what effectively amounts to a AU$250 additional charge, I'm happy to do it. Again this trip, when booking the train travel I have relied heavily on the man in seat 61 and this is my start point before doing anything. I log on to www.seat61.com prior to planning my journey and use the information and links available to get me to the best sites to purchase tickets. Without the information this man has available on his website, it would be almost impossible to organise so many train journeys over so many destinations and countries. There is just too much research required to be able to organise the train travel we need to get the extremely cheap prices without this website. If you ever want to travel by train, anywhere, visiting the seat61 website is a must. In addition to purchasing train tickets, we also bought a new suitcase but this is no ordinary suitcase. On our last trip through Europe, we bought 2 of these "Osprey Sojourn" bags. These are quite large bags that have wheels but double as a backpack. They weren't cheap, about $400 a pop but these are quality bags. They are as rugged as buggery and we gave them a fair flogging during our last European holiday and they stood up to the rigours. So we decided to buy another one but a smaller slightly different version. This is the sister pack with the same features but it has more pockets and it has a smaller removable back pack. I know it doesn't sound exciting but when you you see this thing, it is!! This will be the bag that the kids get to pull around. The next few weeks will be spent sending emails to confirm our accommodation bookings and paying the balance on a few of them as well as completing the train ticket purchases. Hopefully we don't get any unexpected return emails like the one we received from our little friend Kathy a couple of months ago....

"Mia models the suitcase"

"Mia modelling again"