I am in the middle of planing my often delayed return trip to Europe. It has taken me forever to get everything organized (and am still trying to do so). What has struck me is just how much more expensive it is – even since 2002. Most hotels in London are now $200 a night and the airfare is over $700. To boot, the Euro is now way stronger than the dollar so even if I wanted to skip the UK, it would still cost a fortune.
The original plan was to leave next week and meet my mom in Spain and my friend Jonathan in Geneva. We ended up pushing the vacation to the end of October, thereby eliminating any cost savings by meeting up with friends. I also wanted to drive around the UK and visit places like Nottingham and Scotland as well as some of our favorite sights from Living TV’s Most Haunted. As I sit here grappling with costs, I am forcing myself to give up certain things I wanted to see. I even got to the point where I was thinking of just ditching Europe all together and going to some other location. heck, for the price of 2-3 weeks in Europe, I can go to New Zealand.
I set a goal of this weekend of getting my final flight information and getting reservations for hotels. It is hard when you haven’t settled on an itinerary. It reminds me of Europe 98 when we had a vague idea of what we wanted to do and we ended up scrambling to find hotels and plane flights and forked over considerable dough.
Speaking of sticker shock, has anyone looked at the price of cars lately????