18th July : The Grand Tour

My trustee Australian bush hat

Hi - Welcome to my cultural tour through Western Europe.

If you have a few minutes a day between the 18th July and mid-November please join me on my four part "Grand Tour" across Western Europe. If you are enjoying the blog, please press the "Follow" button and pass on the URL & let me know what you are enjoying; if not enjoying it, please let me know why.

Background to this journey:

1974 Alphasud

Around Easter 1975 I started a trip that would have seen me travel to Israel and with a travel companion, cross Europe from Greece, through Italy, France, Spain & eventually England. Unfortunately life, in the shape of a strike by Olympic Airways staff in Athens, and a driver of an Alphasud offering a lift to two young intrepid hitchhikers, intervened and the remainder of that trip had to be, basically, side-lined. 

 

Me in 1975

Hillel the Elder

In retrospect, the events of that ridiculous St. Patrick's Day in 1975 (under a bridge, off the Autostrade, on the road from Rome to Milan) was just the universe suggesting that that was not the time for such a journey.  Some 47 years later I am off on my own this time to complete that side-lined journey, plus some. Why am I doing this trip now? Well in the words of Hillel the Elder - If not now, when?  especially given my current & ever increasing age, my general health and that I have just recently retired.

 

So armed now with an almost extra half-century of hands-on research through the University of Life, together with Ancient History degrees from the University of Western Australia, and a quarter century of teaching Computer Science to some of the greatest years 11 & 12 students any teacher could ever dream of having, I am about to depart on my stalled Cultural Tour of Western Europe. I will be staying in low-cost one or two star hotels, traveling by bus or train and eating like the locals (sort of),  just like the way the 23 year old shade of my younger-self planned to do.

The cultural purpose of my tour:

Gold Hittite god 1400 - 1200 bce

I have always loved museums and art galleries, thanks to my mother who used to drag me, when young, to every museum she could find. I can now spend hours looking at images of paintings and archaeological artifacts in books, or on the web. However it is time for me to see these artifacts and art works of the great masters in the flesh, so to speak. As a retired teacher I have the time but not the financial resources required to go and visit Kemet (Egypt) or Anatolia (Turkey), or Canaan/Levant (Syria, Lebanon, Israel) or Mesopotamia (Iraq) or Minoan/Mycenaean (Greece), but I can get to see the many artifacts held in some of the greatest museums in the world that are situated, just by chance, in the very cities I plan to visit. The same goes for some of the great paintings and architecture of the world.

The structure of my tour:

My Grand Tour will be broken into four separate journeys. There are good reasons for me to break it up, but in a nut shell, I am no longer that young & springy, and I need some recharging time along the way LOL.

So.......Quo Vadis?   

 

All things being equal, my journey will encompass the following (You can click on the Europe map to gain a larger view of where I am traveling to)

Europe & the cities I will visit

Journey 1: London and environs

• London, Oxford & Cambridge.
  

Journey 2:: Northern Spain from West to East.

• Flight to Bilbao, bus to Madrid, train to Valencia, bus to Barcelona, bus to Paris, (quick hello to family & hopefully the new baby) & Euro Star back to London for a family wedding.
  

Journey 3: Denmark to Italy via Germany, Czechia & Switzerland

• Flight to Copenhagen, bus to Berlin, train to Leipzig, train to Dresden, bus to Prague,  Bus to Munich, Train to Zurich, Train to Milan, Flight to London
  

Journey 4: the Netherlands, Belgium and France

• Flight to Amsterdam, Bus to Leiden, buses toRotterdam, Antwerp, & Brussels .........

........ and then a bit more time with family (in Paris & London).................... & back to Perth, having been away for about 4 months!

Notes on travel & accommodation:  

Other than where air travel is a necessity, I have booked buses & trains to get me around Europe. I have also booked rather basic accommodation (single room with own or shared bathrooms) in most cities, all with one thing in common - bookings are within 1/2 to 1 km from the city centers.  For me these locations are strategic because most major museums & art galleries I want to see are generally close to city centers.

On-line sites used for bookings:

I have used a number of on-line booking web-sites for this trip:

• booking.com for most of my accommodation requirements
  
• Omio.com & flexibus.com for most of my inter-city & inter-country traveling requirements (bus, train & air)
  
• Singapore Air for my outward and inward bound flights to and from Perth. I determined that, after looking at Webjet and Skyscanner etc, it made my life that much easier to deal with the airline directly and at no extra cost.
•  Easyjet & Veiling for those shorter flights around Europe.

These sites have already proved themselves more than capable of helping when some interesting yet small booking issues have already arisen.

Length of flight versus budget

Had I flown the Qantas Perth to London direct flight it would have saved me 2 1/2 hours of end-to-end in air time but would have cost an extra $1000 for the ticket. When one is travelling on a somewhat tight budget, as I am, $1000 on a trip is a lot of money. Just consider your priorities.

Insurance on the cusp of turning 70

A very important consideration to take into account when organising insurance is your age especially when you are on the cusp of turning 70. It is very important that one books and pays for the insurance before physically turning 70, even if your 70th is the next day. You will save a fortune in pain and money.  

My primary travel insurance was done through 1Cover. I have used them a number of times over the years and although I have never needed to make any claims I found their rates and small print somewhat more acceptable than most other companies. At the time of my insurance purchase 1Cover were one of the only insurers who gave complete Covid cover across all the countries I have planned to visit in Europe. One company advertised Covid cover but they specifically denied covered for every country I planned to visit. Bottom line, read the fine print before you buy.

Travel insurance & extending one's trip
Of course, even Covid to the side for the moment, travel insurance is critical & necessary for everyone. However there may be restrictions.

The most important of these restrictions seems to be the amount of time they will insure one for. This time restriction may be because of age or Covid, I could not get a straight answer from the insurers. I booked my return flights before I looked at insurance and when I went to insure myself I discovered that I was planning to be away for 104 days but the best I could do for insurance was 90 days. This left me with two weeks uninsured. Obviously I was not comfortable with this situation. 

To add to my non-insured days-away dilemma I needed to extend my trip by an extra two to three weeks as I still had planned places to visit but had run out of planned time. 

So going onto the web yet again I found a few on-line insurers that offered one way insurance for Australians who were already overseas. One company very kindly supplied me with sufficient insurance to allow me to complete my trip and to get me home.

Notes on the city pages 

• I have tried to be accurate with selecting the correct flags for each city. I apologise if errors have crept in. Please let me know, and I will endevour to make the correction. However I do not want to get involved with local politics.
• All maps are clickable but not searchable.
• The blog was created on a laptop and tested on both 10" tablet and my Pixel 6. The layout appears more than readable on both the laptop and the tablet, but I would highly suggest turning your phone to landscape to gain the best view of the information and images.