We have the Barclay’s Arrival card. It’s a true chip and pin (vs chip and signature). No foreign transaction fees and 2 points for every dollar spent. It has saved our necks a few times. Unattended train ticket kiosks and other type of ticket vending machines require a chip and pin.
Sitting in Warsaw at this moment (hey…don’t rob the house…we have a full time on site sitter :)). Poland, and other upcoming ex-east block countries not on the Euro (comparatively weak and floating currencies) are quite inexpensive.
H left his computer bag in a cab last night. Between the hotel concierge, the security footage and some rapid phone calls, the cab driver was back - bag in hand - within 15 minutes. We feel very safe even though both of our recent visits were during nation holidays which included some political rallies.
Then it’s back to Berlin for a few days and finishing off with a cruise of the UK, Ireland and Scotland. Love Berlin - such a fun and vibrant city. Also not expensive compared to other destinations. We will end the trip with a week in London. GULP…that is expensive.
We are cruising the Panama Canal later this year.
H is 62, we’ve been hearing about a lot of illnesses and health issues in his friendship/age group. Time to do this stuff NOW.
We live in London, but don’t do much “European” travel these days. Any extra money or time we have is usually spent going back to the US to visit our kids and parents. But we did have a nice weekend on the Isle of Wight last week! Enjoy all your trips everyone! If anyone is in London, come see me at the Benjamin Franklin House or Apsley House. I’ll give you a nice personalized tour!
We are headed on a very similar cruise to @jshain in the middle of July. @jshain - with whom did you book the tour in St Petersburg? We typically like doing things on our own - but for St Petersburg, will have to go with an organized tour.
Looking forward to seeing the different countries - we are also planning to spend some time in Oslo before the cruise and Lisbon after the cruise (very brief stopover).
We live in CT but our family has a home in Britain too. We spend 6 weeks there every summer, taking advantage of the chance to hop over to the continent on Eurostar. I still marvel how you get on the train in London and 3 hours later you are in central Paris. Beats going from NYC to Philly!
@Bromfield2, we’ll be in Croatia and on the Dalmatian Coast in September, also! I’ll wave in your general direction. We’re going for our 25th anniversary after a week in the Cote d’Azur with a group of college friends. Can’t wait!
Just returned from 2 weeks in Holland & France. We did a bike & barge trip from Amsterdam around northern Holland to see the tulip fields in bloom. Then we took a train to France to visit Monet’s garden in Giverny & the D-Day beaches in Normandy. Weather was sunny but cold (down jacket & gloves felt good).
A couple recommendations:
install WhatsApp on your smartphone. The people you are texting also need to install WhatsApp on their phones. The app is free & allows you to send text messages without using data or an international calling plan from any place that you have WiFi. When not using your smartphone, set it on airplane mode to avoid roaming charges and to conserve your battery.
@jshain: I have an iPhone but my S1 uses a Samsung Galaxy, and WhatsApp works for both iPhone & Android platforms. Even if both parties have iPhones, you’d still need to install the app on both phones. But if both have iPhones, you could also use FaceTime via WiFi for international communications. It’s just that sometimes texting is more convenient than FaceTime, especially given the time differences.
PS. You’ll still need a European plug adapter with the power strip.
FYI- WhatsApp messenger platform is owned by Facebook.
jshain, there are international texting charges, I phone or whatever phone. Whatsapp gives you free texting to someone else with Whatsapp, as long as you have wifi. Facebook Messenger does the same, but you have to be friends on FB to use Messenger.
Next winter I’ll go to France after D finishes her internship. We are thinking of traveling to someplace in Spain that might not be too cold in December. Maybe Morocco? Suggestions? I’ve only been to far northern Spain, Basque country previously.
When H and I were in Europe last fall we installed Whatsapp and our D’s back home also installed it. We did not have an international phone plan on our phones for the trip, but my H has a work phone with an international plan that he also brought along. We communicated with our D’s mostly on Whatsapp and we did talk twice to younger D via Skype. H and I have Samsung phones and our D’s have iphones thus facetime wouldn’t have worked for us. We just kept our phones in airplane mode and used wifi at our hotels and anywhere when we were out and about. It worked great for us and we had no extra charges on our cell phone plans.
If the ship we’re on has wifi, that is included, is there an advantage to using Whatsapp when on the ship? In the past, our wifi seems to be just as fast if not faster than our wifi at home.
@12rmh18 My wife and I just got back from a trip to Copenhagen and the Netherlands. I’ve always wanted to see the tulips in season. Our plan had been to rent bikes for a day or two, but the cold and rain put the quietus on that. On at least one day the high temperature in the Netherlands was lower than the high in Siberia. We did see Keukenhof, and apparently timed everything perfectly.
For anyone wanting to visit the Netherlands, I highly recommend Haarlem as a base rather than Amsterdam. Haarlem is walkable and full of great restaurants, and it’s only a 20-minute train ride into Amsterdam, with trains leaving every 10 minutes.
Keeping in touch has gotten cheaper. Verizon has a plan you can sign up for at no cost that will give you a day of phone and data service for $10 and just subtract it from your monthly plan; you are only charged the $10 for days you use the phone. My wife signed up for this and was able to use it for work. Since we have 30GB a month in data, there is more than enough. I have an unlocked wifi hotspot and use a chip from Cellhire that costs $129 for 5GB of data, spread out over up to 30 days. On our most recent trip signing up for the Verizon service would have been cheaper.
This was my second trip to Europe this year. I took my son and a friend to Germany for Spring Break, and my daughter and I are spending the month of June in Europe. We got round-trip tickets into Brussels for 54,000 miles during a sale Delta held in February. After Delta cancelled their ATL-BRU flight they agreed to let us fly into Amsterdam so we could avoid a three-legged dog with two flight changes.
My daughter and I had planned for our month to be a very relaxed one, with a week or 10 days devoted to some small French town or another. But then I saw the prices on cruises, which are dirt-cheap this summer, and booked a 12-night Adriatic cruise out of Venice that includes Dubrovnik and Ravenna, both places I’ve wanted to see.
The difference between WhatsApp & Skype/FaceTime is that WhatsApp is text messaging, while Skype & FaceTime are face-to-face communications. It’s mostly a matter of personal preference in communications, but given a 6-hr time difference between Europe & US, sometimes texting is more convenient.
You can use WhatsApp anywhere that you have WiFi - on the cruise ship, at a Starbucks, in a museum. It’s convenient & it’s free. But if you prefer to communicate by phone, check with your cellphone provider about international calling & data plans. I’m cheap - I’d rather save money using free communication & spend it on a local beer or a nice coffee & pastry.
@EarlVanDorn, we did bicycle through the tulip fields. They were amazing swaths of color! Keukenhof Gardens was equally magnificent. We slept & ate on a passenger barge which followed us along the canals while we bicycled each day. The tour company provided bicycles with waterproof bags in which we packed rain jackets & lunches. My DH thought the bike & barge part was the most relaxing part of our entire trip because you just show up & ride. The combination of down jacket + GoreTex rain gear worked well for early spring weather. Yes, it was chilly - in the 40s - and a down jacket & gloves felt especially good on the morning we were up before sunrise cycling to the Aalsmeer Flower Auction, which opens at 7:00am. (Aalsmeer is the largest flower auction in the world, with 20 million flowers from around the world bought & sold every day. It looks like an ant hill bustling with ‘organized chaos.’)
Enjoy all your trips everyone! If anyone is in London, come see me at the Benjamin Franklin House or Apsley House. I’ll give you a nice personalized tour!