Mike D Goes to Europe!

Well, many of you had some strong feelings about me only bringing one pair of pants on my trip, most enthusiastically my mom, who was not so keen on the concept.  Thank you for sharing.

Thanks largely to the advice of my friend, former boss, and expert traveler, Mike Manning, I decided to ditch the jeans altogether, and I picked up two pairs of pants from REI this morning.  One is lightweight nylon, looks pretty decent wrinkled, and has good zip-up and button-up pockets for thwarting pickpockets.  The other pair are slightly heavier cargo pants which zip off into shorts.  They have good secure pockets as well.  Both of them claim to be quick-drying, so when I get rained on, they should be ready for action again much more quickly than the jeans would have been.

Following the Rick Steves philosophy of packing light, I am going to Europe for three weeks with nothing more than a single carry-on bag and the clothes on my back.  Below is a picture of everything I am bringing, with the exception of what I am wearing on the plane and my camera (for obvious reasons), all of it packed into the backpack at the top of the picture.

Stuff I Packed

Top row: backpack; collapsible umbrella; the pertinent pages sliced out of several guidebooks; pen.

Middle row: packing cube full of miscellaneous electronics, such as chargers, adapters, extra memory card for camera, and travel alarm clock; vacuum sealed bag of socks (six pears white, one pair black); iPhone; earphones; a few streetmaps; journal; case for glasses; a couple of phrase books (one for French, one for everyone else); one book for recreational reading; a small spiral notepad; gym shorts; packing cube full of underwear (six pairs).

Bottom row: small day pack backpack (for carrying around town while the big bag stays in the hotel room); vacuum sealed bag containing three collared shirts, one sweater and a light rain jacket; vacuum sealed bag of t-shirts (4 with stuff printed on them, 2 plain black, 1 plain white); money belt, containing passport, rail pass, driver’s license, ATM card, credit card, and cash; toiletries kit; stain remover pen; assorted pain relievers, antacids, vitamins, etc.; ear plugs; homeopathic jet lag prevention (I’ll let you know if it works); a small container of Altoids.

It might not look like much, but it feels like a lot of weight when I put it all in the bag, and put the bag on my back.  But then again, I am getting older.

A note about the vacuum bags: no, they are not to keep my clothes fresh (that’s just a bonus!).  These reusable, resealable bags allow you to compress otherwise bulky clothes into a much smaller amount of space.  Without them, I don’t think I would be able to pull off taking a single carry-on bag.

You may have noticed that there are no pants in the picture.  I went back and forth over the idea of bringing an extra pair, but I finally decided to try going with just the one pair of jeans that I will be wearing on the plain.  It’s a little risky and I may regret it, but bringing another pair seemed like it would be a lot of extra bulk for not much extra use.  Stay tuned to see if this comes back to bite me or not.

In planning for this trip, I relied heavily on the books and PBS tv show by Rick Steves. He can come off as a bit of a namby-pamby, but I think his approach to travel abroad is dead-on.  A few key points to his travel philosophy:

Travel as a temporary European.  Go see the touristy sights if that’s what interests you, but also try to get off the beaten path.  Get to know the locals in each town you visit.  Try to live a day in their shoes and get a feel for what their lives are really like.  Don’t just see Europe, experience it.

Pack light.  This means no checked bags - just what you can carry.  This allows you to get from one place to another much more quickly and easily, and saves you a lot of hassle lugging your big heavy bag over cobblestone streets.  (More on the details of what I’m packing in the next exciting installment.)

One of the best ways to change foreigners’ opinions of Americans is to go to their countries, meet them, be friendly, interested, and respectful, and leave them with a positive impression.  Rather than pretending to be Canadian, travel as an ambassador for those of us who consider ourselves enlightened, and generally pretty cool, Americans.  Let’s show the rest of the world that not all of us voted for Bush or believe that we are “spreading democracy” in Iraq.

Speaking of iPhones, a good deal of my travel strategy hinges around the idea that I will have my trusty iPhone with me on my trip.  I can use it to look up train schedules, view maps of the places I’m visiting, and look for fun stuff to see and do at my various stops.  This should help me to cut down on some bulk by leaving behind additional guidebooks and printed maps that I might otherwise have had to bring.

A note for you would-be iPhone travelers: if you live in the US and you don’t get some additional features added to your plan, you will get charged a butt-load of extra money for accessing data outside of your normal area.  What you will want to add is what AT&T calls the Data Global Add-On. There are different levels of this package, which give you different amounts of data. They ain’t cheap, but they are a lot cheaper than the “data roaming” charges you would get stuck with otherwise. And considering what an enormous and compact travel aid the iPhone can be, I think it’s worth the price. What I recommend is that you look at your previous bills and see how much data you typically use. Then buy the add-on that seems appropriate for your usage habits, figuring that you may actually use your iPhone a little more while travelling than you do at home.

Furthermore, you might also want to get an international calling plan, like their World Traveler plan. It’s only $5.99 for a month, but be warned that it doesn’t get you anything more than a discount on what would otherwise be even steeper international calling rates. It will get you $0.99/minute, rather than $1.29/minute, in most (not all) Western European countries. That rate applies both to calls within Europe and to calls back home from Europe. If you won’t be making a lot of calls, it’s not really worth it. But you never know.

Also, text messages are not free from Europe, even if they are included in your normal plan. With the aforementioned World Traveler plan, I’ll be able to receive text messages for no additional charge, but sending will cost $0.50 each. So, if you text me while I’m over there, I will likely reply via e-mail, which is included in my data package.

One last note on international calling features: I was warned by the AT&T service dude that calls and data usage from outside your home area can sometimes take 15-30 days from the time you use it until it shows up on your bill. This usage will be charged as if it takes place at the time AT&T gets the usage information from foreign carriers. In other words, if you come home and cancel these features before those charges show up, you will get charged full roaming rates, and you might as well have never bothered buying those international features. What you will have to do, instead, is refrain from canceling said features until you are confident that all of this usage has been accounted for. Kind of lame, since it means you are paying for the international add-ons for longer than you are actually using them, but again, probably worth it. If you feel like gambling, you can try not activating the international features until you are a few days into your trip, hoping that none of the usage gets charged in a timely manner. I won’t be risking that, but if you want to try it, I’d be curious to see how it works out.

Seriously, the very last note on international calling features: AT&T doesn’t have the means to delay the activation of a feature until a date you give them in the future. When you ask for a feature to be added, it is added immediately. So, wait until you are about to leave before adding any of this stuff, unless you want to take advantage of the international rates to call ahead for hotel bookings, etc.

As you may have heard, pickpockets are prevalent and very crafty in Europe, especially at popular tourist destinations. So, if your headed over there with your handy iPal, be alert and keep it safe. If you keep it in a pocket that’s not fastened shut, don’t be surprised when a stranger “accidentally” bumps into you, and you later discover your iPhone is gone.

Hello, and welcome to my humble little travelogue.  If you want to get the background behind why I am taking this trip, please read the About page.  If you want to see my itinerary at a glance, you can check out the Itinerary page.

At the time of this writing, I have my airline tickets booked, all my hotel rooms reserved, I have my railpass, train reservations for a few segments that require them, most of my stuff is packed, and I am pretty close to 100% ready to go, aside from a few things that necessarily need to wait til the last minute.

I am planning to update this blog as I travel, mostly via my iPhone.  Because of this, some of my posts may be more brief than I might like, because, as cool as an iPhone is, it’s not a computer with a real keyboard.  It simply takes longer to type stuff on it, so I will likely end up typing less.  C’est la vie.

Also, I will be bringing my camera and hopefully capturing lots of golden moments, but you likely won’t see many of thos shots on this blog, because I probably won’t have a chance to get the shots off of my camera and on to a computer until I get home.  Instead, I will try to take a few shots using my iPhone’s inferior, but at least somewhat adequate, built-in camera.  These shots will hopefully be enough to give you the gist and to jazz up my dull scrobbling with a few bursts of color on the screen.