Now what’s next? Considering how you’ve already decided you will be landing at a different place, renting a car is not an option. The drop off fees in Europe are incredibly high when leaving a rental at a different location, and considering how the purpose of planning something so carefully is to keep the costs as low as possible, you’re now going to see what train connections there are. It’s not difficult, most train websites in Western Europe have a well working English version. Do check out if you’re on the actual site of the train company, and not some semi scalper site. Those sites ask more for train tickets because they offer the extra service of looking up your train journey, while this can easily be done by yourself. For example, a train ticket from Milan to Rome costs 30E on the official site, but 120E on a scalper site. It’s not just concert tickets that are being sold by “official” scalpers (Viagogo and the likes), they know many tourists from other continents have no ****ing clue what they’re getting into when flying to Europe.

When looking at the picture you see that the distance between the cities is roughly the same, thus this equals a train ride that’s of roughly the same duration as well. (Genova – Torino will be the same as Milano – Genova etc.) This means you don’t need to look up the times for every single train ride, once you know how long one train ride is, you can easily assume that most are of the same length, unless you’re covering mountains, which means climbing and tunnels. For information’s sake, most train journey’s take 2 hours, apart from the one to Genève and Nice as one of those goes through the Alps and the other follows the coastline.

When talking about train journeys, try to find out as to whether they’re actually any interesting. There’s more to sitting in a train and waiting to arrive. You’re in a foreign country after all, chances are the scenery is very different. When doing this, I found out the journey from Genova to Nice was one of the most beautiful train journeys of Europe, so although it costs more time, you’re actually sightseeing when on the train, which makes the journey a lot more interesting. It’s no longer a train ride, it’s part of your holiday. It’s once I started doing this I found out that the train ride from Genova to Nice was special, and thus the main reason why I decided we’d leave from Nice as opposed to travelling back to Milan.

Once flights were booked, it was time to take a look at the schedule. We’d land on a Friday and would leave on a Tuesday. I’d decided that we’d be travelling from Milan to Torino, then to Genova, and then head to Nice. Yes, that’s a lot of travelling spread out over just 5 days, but when planned well in advance it’s as much of a hassle as you might think. I’d already looked up how long the train journeys would be, and considering how all of these cities are relatively small you don’t need to spend a full day there in order to actually see them. When looking into train journeys and cities I found out Genova had a huge aquarium and Torino had the biggest car museum of Europe. Originally I intended to travel from Torino to Nice, but now it turned out the train would pretty much pass Genova, so why not make that stop there? It’d make the train ride a lot more fun, considering you’d still be in the train for 5 hours, but when you’re doing 2 hours in the morning and then 3 in the evening it doesn’t feel as long, and thus makes it a lot less boring.

The schedule was set, now it was time to look for hotels. I always use booking.com. They’re quite reliable, although out of all the bookings I’ve made 2 haven’t come through to said hotel. I once arrived in Paris and a booking I’d made for a hotel there never made it to the hotel, and I think I remember a similar thing having happened somewhere in America or London perhaps? I can’t remember. And sometimes your hotel can be utterly shit, which has happened to me twice now, once in Paris and once in Budapest. With a bit of haggling you can get a refund for that as well, and once you get a bit of experience you’ll be able to book a new hotel in a few hours.

Anyway, after making this booking , my advice is to contact the hotel a day or 2 later to check if they did receive the same confirmation you got. If you don’t do this and booking.com didn’t send their confirmation, chances are that once you arrive, the hotel is charging different prices than what you expected, or the hotel actually has no more room for you. You made a booking 4 months in advance for a certain period, but if this certain period is summer, the hotel will charge higher prices. It’s high season after all. I was fortunate that both times the hotel adjusted its prices to the one booking.com had put up, but a hotel is not obligated to do such thing. They do want their relationship with booking.com to stay well though, after all, the site offers them great publicity and a lot of costumers.
As to what’s a good price for a room it really depends on the country and city. I rarely take a hotel in the center of the city, they’re very expensive and you often wind up paying twice the amount of money for a similar hotel located on the outskirts of town. Most, if not all European cities, have great public transportation so why worry as to how to get to a center of a city? Besides, you can actually often walk from your hotel to the city center if your city is not too big. Experience with hotels comes once you travel a lot. I’ll never pay anything below 30E in France for a night anymore after having had rooms where I had to hold up the shower head myself, but would do it in a heartbeat in Spain or Italy as most hotels aren’t too expensive over there. Once hotels were booked we were ready to go.

Le trip.
Our holiday started on a Friday morning. I’d packed my bag that evening before, and then once I got in the car and was on the way to pick up the brother I realized I’d forgotten a few things. No worries, if you’ve got your passport you can always buy things on your holiday. I’m not returning back home for toothpaste or something similar. I was well on time (I think) because I kept myself to the speed limit like usual, and once the brother got in we drove to the train station. He soon shouted “STOP” because there was a speed bump on the road, but my incredible car doesn’t need to slow down for these things. Well, not for me, the brother thought differently once his head hit the roof, much to my amusement. Near the train station the speed bumps were a little higher though, so slowing down was required and for the first time since I bought my car I found out what those speed bumps are actually for. Imagine that! Parking was a great adventure as well with my brother telling me how much further I could go, and once he said stop I put the car in Park, it drove back a few centimeters and my towing hook hit the barrier. My car and the barrier survived the massive crash though, and once I got out it turned out I’d put the car that far back that there was actually no way we’d be able to get behind the car to get the bags out. No idea what mastermind thought putting the car this far back was a great idea, but anyway, you should’ve seen the brother struggle to actually open the booth while maneuvering his 210cm tall body on both a barrier and the ground. Wonderful.

This 210cm tall body was smart enough to check us in early so we had the seats with extra leg space. It’s a bitch sitting in these seats being as tall as I am but it’s pretty much impossible to sit there when you’re as tall as my brother is. Fortunately, no extra costs were needed so this cheap bastard had no problem getting a seat next to my wealthy brother. I demanded the seat next to the window, and what a window it was:



Exactly. Right next to the emergency doors. No view at all. Oh well, the extra leg space was nice though;