March was a very busy month for Kevin - finished his second school term, SxSW, OK/C (as always), fantasy hockey …. and me - especially as I kept bugging him to finalise our trips in April - Easter & CHI. I did all the research, and asked Kevin to review them before booking. For our Easter trip in Barcelona, it was pretty difficult to find the best time of flight and a hotel with good price and location. Since we are going to Barcelona in Easter, I knew flights and hotels were not going to be cheap and the good ones would go fast. In trying to maximise our time there with favourable flight times, finding a hotel I wanted, and wanting to keep Kevin informed to get his agreement, I almost drove myself crazy, and Kevin … not as bad as me but I think he must have been annoyed by me. Nonetheless, I finalised our Barcelona trip’s itinerary the weekend after SxSW.
For the Vienna trip, the orginal plan was only to go to Vienna, but now we are going to visit Budapest, Hungary as well. Finding flights and hotel was an easy task, especially the hotel part after knowing where his friends and others were staying for the CHI event. Planning the itinerary was more difficult. We basically had to plan around the CHI event, and consider Kevin’s friends’ itineraries for CHI, to see how it would work out best. Whether I went before or after CHI to see Vienna was a long discussion between Kevin and I. Kevin was worried about my work, and I was trying to work with his CHI schedule. Then it got a little more complicated when Budapest was mixed into the plan. After Kevin got confirmation from his friend in Budapest on a convenient time for us to visit, I just made up the rest of the itinerary - flight & hotel. Of course, I consulted with my boss (Kevin) first to make sure everything was good before booking.
I am very excited about our trips. Here are our itineraries for this month:
9 to 11: Barcelona
17 to 25: Budapest & Vienna - for me
Kevin will stay in Vienna for another week for CHI, and return to London on 30th April.
I will be pretty broke after April from these two trips. Kevin has already planned our next trip (well … there may be few in between). We will be going for the hockey game(s) - World Cup 2004, and will visit two cities: Helsinki, Finland and Stockholm, Sweden at the end of Aug / early Sept.
Here are few sites I found very useful for my Barcelona & Vienna trip research:
- Barcelona Map
- Finding Vienna Address
- Vienna Maps 1 (general idea)
- Vienna Maps 2
Again, this link shows only the districts. I found it very helpful to know where the Districts were when I booked my hotel. District 1 is downtown where you want to stay close, but you can find a hotel just outside of District 1 to keep the cost low.
For our Budapest visit, we will rely on Kevin’s friend and our travel guide. Stay tuned for my reports =)
Wow, sounds like a full schedule! Have you posted these pics, yet?
It sounds like you’ve covered a lot of ground in your time there. Have you seen the Scandinavian countries, yet? Eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, …)?
I’m dying to go back to Europe, particularly France and Spain (where I have friends). I admit I’m more partial toward the romantic countries, so those would be at the top of the list, then the rest.
Kevin and I are still editing the pictures. Hopefully, we will have the pictures ready and post by mid May. We will visit Finland and Sweden later in the summer (Are they Scandinavian countries?). For Eastern Europe, we have only visited Prague. There are some many European cities that we would love to visit. So glad that I have a job now, so I can make some money for our travels.