This year celebrates our 30th year of traveling together to Europe. We've always made our own travel arrangements, everything from airline tickets to hotel/apartment reservations to public transportation. Well, this year we've connected up with Byway Travel in the UK. Their specialty is arranging travel by train in Europe. While we took care of purchasing our airline tickets (Delta and Air France), Byway worked up a trip to Catalonia by rail, including booking the hotels and getting our train tickets, all paid for in advance.
So, on 11 April we fly from Grand Rapids to Detroit then on to Paris. After spending a night near the Gare de Lyon we take the TGV direct to Spain.
OK, so we're actually spending our time in Catalonia: we stop in Girona for three nights then on to Tarragona for three nights, ending in Barcelona for four nights.
From Barcelona we head back to France and to Bordeaux to meet up with friends Richard and Pauline. After four nights exploring a part of France we have never seen before, we hope to spend a couple of nights at Richard and Pauline's home in Mouchan.
From there we catch a train back to Paris. We'll spend four nights at an apartment in the 12th arrondissement before returning to the US.
We have scheduled cooking classes with market trips in Barcelona and Paris, which should be lots of fun and a new experience for us both!
The trip should take about three weeks.
Byway sent us our Journey Guide (digital) as well as digital paper reservations to print out which would cover our long-distance trains. Our paper Eurail passes will come this week.
On the practical side we will be taking at least one of our sturdy Thule rollers along with a small rolling bag and of course our Thule backpacks, all of which saw good service in 2022.
As for communication, I went for an eSIM from Airalo. Good for 30 days it will give me 5 GB of data only (no phone number) for $20! We will rely on our normal service for texting, using wi-fi etc. Once we land in Paris I just open the phone, turn the new eSim on and it should connect to a local network. The card works in 39 European countries and should connect to local networks wherever we are in France and Spain. Should be interesting. . . . I'll be posting about our use of the new eSim throughout the trip.
I'll be connecting with Byway for support on Whatsapp so that will also be new for me as well. I trust it will work out just fine. (I see some of you are smiling at such a notion. . . .)
Stay tuned!
