Before going on Dave and Brian’s Excellent Vacation, I had read Andy Ihnatko’s Andy’s Travel Tips (which is offline, while he futzes with his site, so it turns out you can’t read it after all) which proved fairly useful, but along the way I found some other tips that he didn’t cover. This is an attempt to list them.
- Passport up to date? You can get one in a hurry if you must, but you’ll hate the hurry-up method, and I’m not even going to tell you how to do that. If you’re about to leave and don’t have a valid passport, you shouldn’t be surfing the web at this point. Anyway, make sure you’ve got a valid passport if you’re going to need one on the trip. Do this even before you book the flight.
- Book plenty early. In the past, I’ve not actually booked vacations until it was almost time to go (i.e. I’d wait until just before the 21-day don’t get screwed by the airline deadline). This time I booked MONTHS in advance, and it helped a lot.
- Verify schedules first. If you’re visiting people, make sure of their schedules BEFORE you book. I only had one scheduling conflict on this vacation, but it meant reversing my whole itinerary, and I’m going to end up with some extra Best Western Euro-Guestcheques left over when I get home because one of the hotels we were planning on staying in is full-up on the (revised) night we’ll be there. This isn’t all bad, since they made a nice gift to our hosts for that evening, and they can use them in any Best Western hotel they’d like.
- Beware false economy. I bought a NWA Great Britain and Ireland Fly/Drive B&B package. Great savings if I’d been driving, but not the wisest decision when travelling by train. Most of the B&B’s are out in the country, and there are already enough hassles when you get to a new city without trying to find a city bus or taxi to a place to sleep for the night. Spend the extra money and get a hotel or other accomodations in town. It’s definitely a lot cheaper than paying for a B&B you don’t use AND paying for the hotel in town. We solved the problem by intentionally shorting ourselves on the vouchers, and using them all up in Dublin.
- Use your travel agent as much as you can. Personally, I always end up working out a lot of the details of the trip myself. Still, a travel agent gets some money as a result of booking tickets and such (unless you did EVERYTHING yourself). You’d might as well take advantage of their expertise. It doesn’t have to be everything, but if you can get a few tips like Trains in Ireland are infrequent on Sundays, it can save a lot of headaches once you’re on the trip. Travel agents know that sort of thing (at least the good ones do), and there’s no reason not to take advantage of their knowledge.
- Make sure of your electronics. I upgraded my digital camera in plenty of time for the trip, and that’s about the only electronic doo-dad I’m taking with. However, with less than two weeks left before departure, I discovered that the SmartMedia adapter that lets me suck the images into my computer needs upgrading to handle the newer, larger SmartMedia cards I can use with the upgraded camera. If I’d missed that, I’d either have to try and buy hard-to-find electronics during the trip, or fall back on a cheap film camera. I’m really glad I thought to test things out a couple weeks in advance.
- Need anything by mail order? Unlike Andy (you haven’t read his travel tips yet? I’ll wait. Go ahead, the link is right up there), I’m not the kind of guy who can buy clothes off the rack. I’m too darned tall, and if I need an extra pair of pants, I end up having to mail-order them about half the time. The other half of the time I either buy Zubaz or just skip it. Anyway, the point of this is that if there’s anything you’re going to have to mail-order before you go, do it far enough in advance that the UPS driver shows up before 5pm on the day you have to leave on a 6pm flight.
- Make lists and notes. Even though I’m a pretty detail-oriented guy, there’s always something I think of well in advance, and then forget at the last moment. Don’t be afraid to keep a shoe-box full of notes to yourself for both before you leave, and for after you get back. Also, anything that goes wrong on the trip should make for a note for next time so you can avoid that same problem. Something else will probably go wrong, but at least you’ve avoided making the same mistake twice.
- Finish what you can before you go. This one gets me every time. I leave something half-done when I leave, and when I get back, it never gets finished. When you get back, you’re going to be tired from travelling and you’re probably going to have to go back to work before you’re done recovering from your vacation. You’re not going to be interested in a two-week (or more) old task, and new stuff is going to come up. If you don’t finish it before you leave, don’t expect it to ever get done.
- Put your house-sitter in the know. Okay, you may not have an actual house-sitter, but you’ve got neighbors or someone who’s going to notice if your house burns down while you’re away. At a minimum, leave them a number where you can be reached. The number of the hotel you’re staying at, or someone you know where you’re going who can be trusted to take a message. Also alert them to any special security measures you’ve taken (like putting the lights on a timer or setting a booby-trap on the back door). You don’t want to give an unpleasant surprise to someone who’s doing you a favor.
- Bring wet-naps. I thought of this on the Travel Day from Hell as I went from train to Tube to train, and discovered my hands were filthy from holding the railings at various points along the way. I thought about it again nearly every time we had to ride the train for more a straight-line shot to somewhere, since every transfer seemed to gum up my hands, and without a convenient way to get ’em clean, I just transferred the dirt to other of my belongings (bags, pants, etc.). Sure, there’s toilets on (some of) the trains, and they have sinks, but it’s easier to just reach into your bag and have clean hands than to head for the toilet, only to discover that you’re closer to your stop than you expected.
- Watch conditions on passes. For example, the Dublin roamer cards are good for a given number of calendar days. This means that if you use one at 11:30 in the evening on a given day, you’ve used up that whole day. It may be significantly better for you to pay cash for the last ride of an evening, and save your card for the first ride of the next day.
- Make sure you understand your equipment. I took a digital camera on my vacation. As I mention in Day 1 in Dublin, this camera just isn’t fast enough to take pictures of stained glass windows, or the insides of cathedrals. I should’ve known that, since I was aware that it was about equivalent to shooting Kodachrome 64, but it didn’t really sink in until I got home and looked at the very jittery pictures. Sigh. If I’d done a test run at home first, I might’ve packed a mini-tripod so I could actually have had those photos turn out.
- Don’t overbuy rail-passes. During our two-week trip in England and Ireland, we bought ten-day passes and only spent five days on the train. Not only that, our passes only got stamped on two days. The shortest-duration BritRail + Ireland pass is a 5 day pass, so that’s the smallest we could have bought, and if I’d know ahead of time that passes are seldom stamped, I’d have definitely bought the 5-day instead of the 10-day pass (saving US$220). Also, we had one day where the cost of our rail-travel would have been £5 (Irish), so that day it would have made sense to pay cash if we didn’t have much more railpass than we needed.
Now if you get caught on the train with a pass that’s used up or you don’t have a ticket, the fine is £100, but if your pass does get used up, you can always buy a ticket and avoid the fine.
The important point here is that you definitely don’t want to buy more pass than you need, and if you’re unsure how much pass you may need, it may make sense to underestimate. If you run short, you may be able to buy a single ticket at some point along the way that would be cheaper than an additional day of railpass. - Buy a phone card if you’ll need it. I didn’t have to make a lot of phone calls on the vacation, but I had to make a few. And I was sometimes calling people who weren’t around, so I needed to call multiple times. I suppose it was a half-dozen phone calls that actually cost me something, but on every single one of those calls, I ended up leaving at least 20p on the phone. A phone card would have saved me a pound or two, and most importantly, I wouldn’t have had to hunt for change before I could make a call. In the UK and Ireland, phones that take phone cards are now ubiquitous. Buy the cheapest card you can, and you’ll probably have a chance to use it.