by SpankTM
Another part of the Spank The Monkey media empire: offending your brain at The Unpleasant Lair Of Spank The Monkey, offending your ears at Spank's Audio Lair, and offending your eyes right here, right now.
,#hamburg,#vienna
jetblacknewmoblog says:
i desperately want to travel europe by train. how did you organise it etc etc?!?
SpankTM says:
It's a hell of a lot easier than it used to be, thanks to the interweb. All the national train companies have websites - Eurostar for the initial cross-Channel run, SNCF for France, Trenitalia for Italy, OBB for Austria, Deutsche Bahn for Germany, and NS for Holland - and you can track them down easily on Google. Timetables and tickets are all available online from there. If you're flexible and/or young you may be able to get a pass of some sort, but we're neither, frankly.
jetblacknewmoblog says:
so do you end up buying a huge wad of tickers prior to travel and just off you go? what did you do about accommodation?
SpankTM says:
Yeah, that's exactly what we did with the tickets. As for the hotels, you've probably noticed we swanked it up a bit - www.mrandmrssmith.com was our starting point for accommodation research, Rough Guide and Lonely Planet were also helpful (and have more options in the more sensible price bracket). Again, all pre-booked before we left.
jetblacknewmoblog says:
i presume the train tickets are open travel? i.e. anytime during a certain period rather than spot on single times?
(sorry for being so quizzical!)
SpankTM says:
No, we had all the train tickets locked down to specific times. Most of the train journeys were over six hours long (Vienna to Hamburg takes nine and a half hours), so we were keen to have reserved seats.