01 May 2011

Cheap travel to Europe on a busy weekend

Hello again!

Just got back from a great trip to England. Of course I got some cheap airline tickets and basically stayed with friends for next to nothing.... I have also mentioned couchsurfing.com in the past for a way to stay cheap, though I found a place through friends of friends this time... Not to bore you about me, but I basically bought flights for the week I could go and found out later that the ROYAL WEDDING was that week! Why is this a big deal at all? Because conventional wisdom would say that cheap travel to Europe, especially London would be hard to find on such an occasion, right? Apparently wrong. Yes, I did buy my tickets about 2 months early and planned ahead a bit, but our flights weren't jam packed and I would venture to guess that cheap travel to Europe wasn't too big of a challenge last week. But maybe I'm just lucky--it only rained two days out of seven when I was in London!! It's not high season yet, so tickets were cheaper and it's a great gateway city, London. My main problem was finding decent meals and paying for public transportation in one of the most expensive cities in the world, not to mention that the dollar isn't exactly worth much these days against European currencies. My other big challenge was finding people who could speak English (I'm not joking!). One of the few people I spoke with whose native language was English, I really had a hard time understanding until I figured out that both three and four start with an "f" for him!! Overall, though, cheap travel to Europe and especially cheap travel in Europe is not too difficult to do. I flew no-frills and took my own water on board to avoid paying big money there, but hey, the bathrooms are still free! Although some airlines are talking about charging for them in the future, most notably Ryanair (super cheap travel within Europe). My friend just got a decent flight roundtrip in May and returning July, so there are still some tickets to be had if you follow the directions out there and on here about getting cheap travel to Europe.

No comments: