As we wrap up three months of travel in Spain, Italy, and England, I thought I’d share what has worked and what hasn’t, and things I would recommend for other travelers now that we have done this long-term trip. I’ll touch on the pros and cons of taking a long trip like this; money; city maps; travel umbrellas; public transportation; food and culture; mobile Internet connections; and whether you should consider being part of a tour group.
Announcers on London metro trains ("the Tube") call out "Mind the gap," because there can be space between the train and platform when you step off. It's an inside joke for us -- we think it's funny because we got yelled at for leaving "gaps" in our tour group (space between people as we moved through crowded streets) in Italy.
Pros and cons of a long-term trip: There is no question that by allowing ourselves more time in each location that we were able to immerse in the experience and go broader and deeper than most tourists do. We’ve had a glorious time, and feel we have really gotten to know the cities we’ve visited. We had to pace ourselves, because you can’t keep up a hectic tour schedule every day for three months.
Planning such a long-term trip allowed us to escape other obligations, such as not having Miss C enrolled in any classes for Spring Quarter, so she was free to immerse in the trip. That said, she did have the tail end of the second semester of Latin II to complete online during the first month. That was a mistake we would not make again. Cut loose all your ties and go explore.
The disadvantage of such a long-term trip is that we miss our home, and my husband/her dad, so much. He did come join us for 2 weeks in Spain, and one week in England, so he was with us for a quarter of the trip. But we’re a close family, and the separation has been hard!
Not only that, but we miss our beds and our pillows and the silence of our neighborhood except for birds waking us up. Where we are now, there are paper-thin walls and lots of sirens and partying noise outside at night. We stayed in a hostal (family-owned economy hotel in Spain, not a student hostel) that reeked of bleach and in places where the sheets were scratchy and the towels wouldn’t absorb any water. Many of the hotels and hostals in Spain and Italy had weird half doors on the showers, so we were always getting water all over the bathroom floor. In El Rocio, Spain, with its sand streets, we tracked sand into the room and everything was gritty; we had sand in our eyebrows and in our nostrils, for crying out loud. Anyone can take the inconveniences of travel for a week or two, but when it’s been three months, it can wear on you. We have loved our adventure, but Miss C has said repeatedly how much she now appreciates how nice our home is (not a bad lesson for a young teen to learn!). There is no place like home, and we will be so glad to be back there.
Money: It’s really expensive in Europe, with the exchange rate for both euros (in Spain and Italy) and pounds sterling (in England) being about 1.6 dollars to a euro or pound while we’ve been here. It’s very easy to use euros or pounds to spend money — they work just like dollars and the biggest difference is getting used to having coins for one and two euros (or one and two pounds) — they don’t use paper for these values at all. The problem is really thinking about how much money you are spending, instead of falling into the trap of basically considering euros or pounds equivalent to dollars. I would think, 20 euros, that’s reasonable for lunch — but we were actually spending 32 dollars, because our money was earned in dollars. That feels a little different. It’s a mindset change to think about it this way, but it’s really necessary if you aren’t overflowing with money.
It is also very necessary to have a debit card from which you can withdraw cash at ATMs. If you can possibly have one with an account like we have at eTrade, which doesn’t charge you fees at different companies’ machines for withdrawals, that is better. One lesson I learned is that to use our debit card, the ATM must have a Visa logo (or Visa Plus logo) on it. We had no problem with this in Spain or Italy, but in England when I first tried to withdraw cash (from three different machines) I kept getting a message that my card was “declined.” Finally an eTrade rep told me to look for a Visa logo — sure enough, these off-brand ATMs don’t work with US cards! Luckily, there are plenty of Visa-authorized machines around; I just had to know to look for them.
You need a lot of cash because very few restaurants (at least in Spain and Italy) will include the tip on a credit card payment for a meal. Even in England, waiters prefer cash for tips (and I do understand that, having worked my way through college as a waitress!). We’ve also needed cash in London to add money to our “Oyster cards” for the Tube. Although they have machines in the stations that accept credit cards, they don’t work with US cards.
Good city maps. You’re missing the point in a European city if you don’t walk all over the place. The side streets are often the most interesting, and they don’t have as many (or any) cars. You need to know the names of all those little streets, so a general overview is not enough. We found good maps in different places, depending on the area. In Andalusia (Southern Spain), they had great information booths with terrific maps (so those covered us in Seville, Cordoba, and Granada). In Madrid and Barcelona, there was no such thing. I found a great map in Madrid at a tourist stand, but I never did get a decent one in Barcelona, and it made a difference. In London, we found an excellent small book, “The Handy London Map & Guide,” which seems to be available in lots of places. If the map you get doesn’t identify the small streets and important buildings and locations, keep looking until you get a good one. Then follow it to walk everywhere, as much as possible.
Small travel umbrellas. You need these, tucked in your purse or backpack. Otherwise you can’t walk all over the place, as described above. We had some lightweight ones from Eddie Bauer that were great all the way through Spain and Italy, but were bent and useless by the time we got to London. We bought some inexpensive ones to replace them.
Know how to use public transportation. Walk as much as you can in the old city centers, but to extend your range, it is excellent to be able to jump on the metro and go. We found it advantageous when we were doing this a lot to buy multiple-use cards. In Rome, it’s easy to buy a disposable 3-day pass that works on all the trains and buses, and you can use it as much as you want for that flat rate. In London, “Oyster cards” are refillable but charge you according to distance and transfers. If you aren’t used to cities, it may take a little doing to get used to hopping on and off trains and making connections, but it is so worth it. Taxis are expensive and tend to have to go the long way around in old European cities. The roads they travel are often choked with traffic. Meanwhile, you can take a 10- or 15-minute train ride for much less money, and you’re right there.
Food and culture. Spain was really hard for us at first. Not only can you not get regular American coffee first thing in the morning, but it’s hard to find at all. Yes, the espresso and cappuccino are delicious, but there just isn’t enough volume for an American coffee addict. We are also used to having a substantial breakfast and lighter dinners. It works just the opposite in Spain. They eat late dinners and hardly have anything at all available for breakfast. It’s similar in Italy, but at least the restaurants have longer hours, especially in Rome. You can usually get something to eat in Rome, whereas in Spain we often had trouble with the kitchens being closed for that afternoon siesta of 3 hours, when we’d just arrived in town after a long train ride, and needed a sandwich! We also suffered from not enough salads and vegetables in Spain (well, we are Californians).
Of course, we also were able to try lots of new foods, especially in Spain, that were great! We stumbled at first on eating tapas, because I didn’t want to take Miss C into bars, where they are often served. We soon got over that hesitation and frequented bars from then on, and became tapas converts.
The point is, when you travel for a short time, it’s okay if there are different foods, serving hours, and routines. But long-term, it is a major adjustment to eat so differently. It requires some careful thought and preparation.
Mobile Internet connection. You can get by with finding occasional public Wifi spots and using the Net when it’s available in restaurants or bars, but if you’re a geek, this will not be enough, especially for long-term travel. The solution we found, buying a mobile Wifi device and getting a different SIM card for it in each country, worked really well. I wrote about this here earlier, so I won’t go into it again here, except to add what we learned on top of this.
First, battery power was usually a greater limitation than Wifi Internet access, using our device. I carried a Power Pack from New Trent which could be used for extra juice for my iPhone or Miss C’s, or for our Mobile Wifi device, and it was really necessary when we were out for a long day.
Secondly, I had more of a limit on my daily Internet use with the mobile Wifi device in Spain than in Italy or England (which were unlimited, or practically so). So it came as a shock when I found I was somehow using hundreds of megabytes of data the first day, without actually using my phone. I learned that I needed to turn off “push” on all the iPhone apps, because otherwise it is constantly exchanging data through the server in the background. I also needed to use my iPhone in Airplane mode, and make phone calls through the data line using the Line2 software. Otherwise my phone would roam and pick up the local cell service, whether I wanted it to, or not.
Beyond these tweaks, it’s been great having a mobile Wifi device with us on our journey, through which we’ve been able to connect three laptops (when Neil was with us) and three iPhones to the Internet. Highly recommended.
Tour groups. I think you either are a tour group person, or you are not. We learned on this trip that we are definitely not tour group people.
Really, I should have known better. I planned six weeks of independent travel in Spain for my daughter and me. We took trains and buses and traveled from Madrid to Seville to El Rocio to Cordoba and back to Madrid, and then with my husband we went to Granada and Barcelona. Then we flew to Rome, where we’d be on our own for four days, and then join an educational tour group for 8 days. My mom joined us in Rome a couple days before the tour was to begin; I went out to the airport to meet her and brought her back into Rome on the train. I now understand that a person who could do all that, who would even think of doing all that, would not be happy following around behind a tour group.
The evening before Day One, we sensed trouble. The group gathered in the cafeteria of a suburban hotel on the outer edge of Rome where they could park the tour bus (we moved out there from our room in the heart of Rome). We were served a bland meal and we thought “Wait, bad food in Italy?” That is what you get with an organized tour — everything is taken care of for you, including meal planning — now think about whether you really want that benefit.
The next day started badly. We arrived at the Colosseum and were lectured about how to bargain with street vendors. We were herded in a group to places where we would stand in a group, and that’s how it went all day. Several of us asked to go to the restroom before we started our tour of the Colosseum. We were told that we should have used the restroom before we left the hotel! What? There were three grandmothers on the trip (including my mom), and heck, I’m 53 myself. Besides that indicating adulthood, and not needing to be lectured about when to go to the restroom, it means that I probably need to go quite a bit more often than the male tour director. It seemed that they did not know where the restroom was, and we were held in a group inside while the tour director went and tried to arrange details of the tour that should have been already handled. It later turned out that the WC (Water Closet) was about 20 feet away from where we stood for about 45 minutes, dying to go.
All day, we spent more time waiting in groups in inhospitable spots (such as in a sandy area on Palatine Hill where the strong wind kept blowing sand in our faces) than we did actually seeing sights. It was always a big, hairy deal to get a bathroom break. And after a continental breakfast (croissant and cappuccino) at 7:30 a.m., we didn’t get to eat lunch until 3:30 p.m., by which time we were ravenous and grouchy. There are further gory details, but you’ll have the idea how we were feeling.
Perhaps this was just a particularly badly organized tour. However, later experiences led us to believe that the construct of a tour group itself is a really bad idea for folks like us. By the end of the first day, my mom, Miss C, and I had decided to defect from the tour and go out on our own. A few days later, when we visited the Vatican Museums independently, we stood gazing in awe at “The School of Athens,” a huge and famous mural painting by Rafael. Tour group after tour group trudged through the room without even looking up at it, and I heard one tour director say, “We’ve got to keep moving.” We were appalled.
One of the tour directors of our one-day tour had admonished us, as we were trudging behind the group endlessly through crowded, narrow streets in Rome, for leaving “gaps” between us and the people in front of us. “What we don’t want is gaps,” he said. His incorrect grammar aside, his attitude irritated us thoroughly. For the next few days, out on our own, we ridiculed him endlessly. As my mom and Miss C strolled leisurely through piazzas or lingered in front of paintings they loved, I’d say, “What we don’t want is gaps!” and they would make faces and huddle close together.
When Miss C and I arrived in London and started taking the Tube, we burst out laughing the first time we heard that we should “Mind the gap.” Because what we do sometimes have are gaps between the train and the platform here in London underground stations. And we don’t mind at all.
