ohsostrange's Blog

I've been researching where to spend my five hundred dollar voucher-and boy are there a lotttttt of places I want to go.  It's kind of depressing to realize how many places I want to see but will probably never make it to.

On the other hand, I've also discovered that it's possible to go to Europe for a lot less money than I ever thought possible.  If you go via a group tour, you can pay less for the entire trip than you'd expect to have to cough up for the air fare alone.  The hotels you'd be staying in are bare-bones places, but I never spend any longer in the room than needed to sleep, shower & change, anyway.  So now my list of possible destinations for my annual birthday trip includes London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.  And I've barely started looking at what's out there that I might be able to swing. 

I always thought of group tours as time spent stuffed in a bus with strangers as you're death-marched through tourist attractions-but it turns out that you don't have to actually stay with the group for activities and tours to get the group rates for the air fare and the hotel.  You can dump the group and hit the museums on your own as much as you like.  You can go to London for less than a hundred dollars a day including air-fare.  Even when you add in enough cash to eat and catch a couple of plays…  A trip to somewhere like Paris or London can be little more expensive than one to New York. 

So I may not get to all of the places I want to go, but I'll definitely get to some of them.

Now if only I could decide which.