Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

One of the things that we considered doing was flying somewhere for the short break that we had last week rather than driving there.

Now, on the face of it, you’d think that with all the cheapo flight offers these days it would bound to be cheaper to fly. After all, you can get to loads of places for £10 including taxes these days.

However, even when you look at flight prices including taxes and so on there are many non-flight charges to take into account. For one thing, if you fly, you need to get to the airport at home and park your car which isn’t cheap (£10 a day at least). Then you need to get to the hotel at the other end which’ll either involve a taxi or car hire. Even on an optimistic view for a family of four that’s £40 for flights, £70 for parking and around £30 for a taxi ie £140 just for transport.

Last, but often not least, taking your own car means lots more space to pack stuff and flexibility in departure time too.

Certainly if you’re travelling any sizeable distance in Europe you’d need to add in the tolls (around £100 for a round-trip across France for example) and probably a similar amount for petrol but if you’re just taking a short break to Brittany or Normandy it’s almost certainly going to be cheaper to take the car.

We’re just back from a spin round Switzerland which took in stops in Geneva, Interlaken and Zermatt so expect to see “some” posts about the trip over the next week or two.

One thing I’d not realised during our last trip to Switzerland is that the waterjet isn’t actually on all of the time and ordinarily runs from 10am through to 10pm. It’s also off for three straight weeks in November for maintenance each year. Funnily enough there aren’t that many photos of it that include the rainbow that you see here yet, of course, it’s visible every day that the sun’s out if you’re standing in the right spot.

Something that might catch you out too is that there are very few ATMs in Geneva in comparison to other major cities around the world.

Anyway, more anon.

We’ve our first hotel booked in Geneva and it’s cheap enough though that’s because it’s just outside Geneva and is actually in France. In fact, it’s quite common for expats working in Geneva to live in France simply because it’s so much cheaper.

That’s not an option for our second stop as Interlaken is right in the middle of Switzerland.

What’s particularly surprising to me are the child policies and non-ensuite rooms. Switzerland has the image of being a very child friendly place but many of the Interlaken hotels rule themselves out for us by charging up to SF30 per child whereas elsewhere it’s common for children to be free. Also, shared bathrooms are commonplace whereas elsewhere in the world ensuite rooms are very much the norm.

Still, we’re still looking….

Although, hopefully, we will be off to Switzerland this Friday, we’re definitely going to be heading for Barcelona in about two weeks.

Yeah, I know, sounds like the life of a jet-setter but I can assure you that we’re definitely not in the jet-setting crowd! In fact, we usually end up eating in McDonalds when we’re in Barcelona which doesn’t strike me as being a hangout for the jetset to me.

However, in that this time we know a couple of weeks in advance that we’re going to some research to find a more suitable Barcelona restaurant in advance. If nothing else, I’m sure that we can do a whole lot better than McDonalds with even a few minutes research. Who knows, perhaps we’ll find out which restaurant that the jetset go to and stare in the windows whilst we’re eating our Big Mac 🙂

We’ve decided to put off our Tuesday Trip this week in that we’re hoping to get away to Switzerland for 5 or 6 days from this Friday.

Hoping I say because we are still waiting for a paper from the old insurance company which’ll let us get the car insured. Without that, I don’t know that we’ll be able to go, although if that happens, we will most definitely be making a trip early in the coming week to the old insurance company where we’ll be sitting until the paper is produced.

Snag is that this coming week is the only real time-slot for the Swiss trip as James’ school is on vacation.