As a guy who recently did: 1 night Athens 3 nights Cairo 1 night santorini 2 nights Naxos 1 night Mykonos 1 night munich it doesn’t seem all that crazy. Just leave out the whole cruise part.
yeah def some overreactions itt. The cruise will break it up nicely and hit a ton of spots she wants to go. Also a brand new ship in a suite so that will be fun.
Doing Europe for the month of June, first 2 weeks solo and have no plan. Then meeting up with 4 friends and doing Munich, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Dublin in 19 days. They haven’t been to Europe before and refused to listen to me when I said that was too much travel in that amount of time
The quick and easy train trips between Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam should help things a bit. Eliminating would be ideal imo.
Well that’s one of the issues I have with them. We are going Munich-Paris-Rome-Amsterdam-Brussels-Dublin
Why Dublin? It's a fine city, been multiple times, but I wouldn't go out of my way to go there in that itinerary.
And yeah I am taking any advice for these cities I can get even though I’ve been to all of them except Brussels/Dublin before
heading to brussels in two months, i'll try to remember to post some recs I have endless paris recs but i'm not sure they're suited for a 5 guy trip. What you all wanting to do?
land, take a cab to a bar, drink the night away, spend the full next day in a dimly lit hotel room, probably
It’s actually me, 2 guys and their wives. Was supposed to be 2 more but it looks like Zap Branigan is bailing on the trip
Guinness, Jameson, Dublin Castle, I've heard Trinity College is nice. The two times I was there was when when I was 20 and studying abroad and then for the PSU-UCF game. Both times involved copious amounts of drinking which seems like a perfectly acceptable way to spend time in Dublin. Temple Bar is overrated and touristy. Go see it if you feel like it but wouldn't spend a lot of time there. It's hard to suggest since you only have two days but Cliffs of Moher (~3 hours from Dublin) is way better than anything you'll see in Dublin. L'Ecrivain is nice if you wanna drop some money on dinner.
Antartica write-up: I'll mostly let the photos do the talking, but have some notes on tour choice below. Spoiler: Photos Itinerary: Day 1-2: Drake Passage Day 3: Antarctic Circle crossing, Detaille Island, Haneusse Bay Day 4: Fish Islands, Prospect Point (only place we got to set foot on the actual continent, instead of an island) Day 5: Vernadsky Research Base - really cool meeting those dudes (and the first overwintering women at that station), Yalour Islands Day 6: Peterman Island, Pleneau Island, Lemaire Channel Day 7: Danco Island, Dallman Bay Day 8: Drake Passage Day 9: Cape Horn, Beagle Channel Those places aren't particularly significant, but hopefully give an idea of the pace - we basically had two excursions per day, usually one landing and one Zodiac cruise. The specific sites you visit are highly dependent upon the weather - both immediate and seasonal. We were lucky to have great weather on almost all of the days, which kept our options fairly broad, and going late in the season let us cross the Antarctic Circle, which is typically ice-choked earlier in the season. But I think even in less optimal conditions, there are still a ton of sites to visit/things to see - the cruise before us found an Emperor Penguin, which we didn't come across, and we didn't make the customary stop at Port Lockroy, having spent an extra half day traveling south. I think you can generally expect to have a string of incredible, unique experiences that knock you down every time you start to think that you've seen what the continent has to offer. I think it's really hard to go there and not have a tour that will blow your senses away, but I think there are better and worse options. For me, the NG Orion via Lindblad - easily the smallest boat in port in Ushuaia - made the most sense for a couple of main reasons. First, Antarctic tour operators are governed by rules that limit site usage - often 50 max at a time, no more than 200 per day. At 100 passengers, the Orion was perfect - everyone got a couple of hours every place we went; with some of the larger ships (I think the "bigger" ones cruising through were around 500), there will be sites where you might not get an opportunity to get off the boat; I have no idea how they manage that, but I'd be pretty salty about going all that way and not getting an opportunity to do whatever the ship was doing that morning or day. Second, I enjoyed the National Geographic tie-in; not knowing how other ships do it, our tour was managed by a team of 8 who were all legit scientists (plus one NG photographer). Each of them had a relevant specialization, and they were all excited to share their passion/field with us. It was definitely a luxury cruise (good food, great service, open bar), but relatively heavy on the learning and fairly sparse on typical cruise ship entertainment. The clientele did tend to be older though - probably 75% of the passengers were 50-70, a few older, and maybe 20% in the 30-40 age range. The majority of those under 40 were in one of the two large groups (my group of 9, which had 5 under 50, and another group of 10, which had 6).
Still sorting through a shitload of photos, I definitely wish I had come to the trip with a better ability to handle a camera Spoiler: More photos
$15000/person, double occupancy + travel to Chile (everything was included for the tour's day there, but we added a couple of days as insurance against flight fuckups) + $1500/person for travel insurance. Probably going up a little bit because they're about to launch a couple of brand new boats with better icebreaking capability.
I think that's a fair comparison, just on a boat instead of in a jeep (he said, having not been on a safari)
I talked to a couple people in Ushuaia who said that it was possible to snag a last minute cruise for $4-$5K, so I was hoping he found the deal of the century and was able to do it for $1500.
Paying 20% of your original fees for insurance seems like a terrible value now that I think about it. That bothers me more than the price
I definitely saw an ad in Ushuaia for a cruise with Quark departing February 29 for $4500. I think you have to be there and it will for the most part be last minute, but it’s definitely possible to book in advance for less than we did. I was off, it was $1500 each/$3k total. Still a lot, but it included broad cancellation protection and medical evacuations.
Antarctica is top of my bucket list and we're trying to swing it in the next couple years. $1500/person is crazy low. Cheapest I've seen is about $7500/person for double occupancy, shit room with no window.
That makes more sense. I mean, I don't think thats unreasonable. If anything goes down, its going to be a big effort to get you out of there.
Yes, let's include the zeros or dollar abbreviations next time. 15 is very vague $1,500 a person is pretty awesome and doable
the cost/benefit just isn’t there for me. when I’m older and have more cash on hand it will be. rn I can visit many other places much cheaper
Shit, you can do very legit 2-3 day safaris for less than $1,000. Antarctica is also so high on my list. Will probably just rent a boat and do it myself at those prices, though Spoiler not serious
At 9:00 AM this morning, while on my honeymoon I found out my dad unexpectedly passed away and then I had to spend 5 hours without cell service rafting out of the jungle. It’s taken me ~23% of my trip’s cost to get to San Jose, a hotel for the night, and get a flight back to the states last minute. And that’s not including the thousands of dollars I’ll likely lose in forfeited hotels and activities (depending on Citi Aadvantage travel reimbursement). For expensive trips, I will forever reconsider declining travel insurance. Oh and for the record for the rest of the thread - my travel agent did all of it, including having a car pick us up from the river and drive us to San Jose (rather than our next destination). My email to her was simply “I’ve had an emergency my dad died. I am getting on the raft and will call in a few hours.”
Wow, I'm really sorry to hear that dude. I hope you take solace in that he was able to see you at your wedding