Traveling around Europe. Summer 2017. Key points
So, I have finally got around to describing our summer trip to Europe. In the end the trip was good, but not as good as some of our others. The landscapes of Norway and New Zealand are still far superior and not really comparable to the places we managed to see this time around. This trip took us through Austria, Switzerland, France, and Liechtenstein. We also passed through Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic, but there we were mostly in transit and barely stopped anywhere. Switzerland was unlucky for us because on the very day we arrived, a long stretch of rain began and lasted for 3 to 4 days. We decided to leave quickly and head for a warmer and sunnier place, the southern coast of France and the French Riviera. If the original Swiss part of the route had worked out, the trip would have contained many more scenic views.
We planned our departure from Dubna so that we would get married on July 14 and leave on July 15 at about 1 p.m. after finishing all the remaining things. In reality we only left at 5 p.m.
As always, we took everything we needed: a tent, sleeping bags, and a whole pile of gear and food. The trunk was full, and the back seats were packed as well. We also realized that for this trip, since we were traveling by car, we should take real pillows for comfort instead of camping pillows. So we drove with two large pillows on the back seat.
Two or three months before the trip we started collecting all the sights along our route into a Google Maps file, which is very convenient. Here is the link. I also marked parking spots there, which I mostly searched for in Parkopedia.
Overall, the trip went according to plan. We were almost robbed once, but having already learned from a previous robbery attempt, we did not let the thief carry it through. I will describe that later.
The most beautiful places on this trip were in Austria and in the mountainous areas of southern France.
Roads
Roads in Europe are good, and this time we did not even have to drive on gravel. There were many toll roads on this trip, so we spent more money on them than even on our trip to Norway. We also had problems with the app that warns about speed cameras. In some countries it simply did not work, so we drove almost without it. We also used another app that beeps when you exceed the speed limit. Of course, we tried not to speed anywhere, but in some places that did not work out and we ended up driving faster than we should have, following the pace of the locals. There were police ambushes too. Once we even saw a camera flash as we drove by, but most likely it caught the car that was overtaking us, not us. Most cameras there look like gray birdhouses so they are hard to notice. Usually there were warning signs for cameras, though sometimes there were not. Often there were several speed-limit signs in a row for the same section.
All toll roads can be bypassed on free roads, but that will cost you far more time and a lot of expensive fuel.
Internet and mobile connection
Before the trip I spent time figuring out which SIM card would be best. Online I found options with Orange, but it had one drawback: it did not work in Switzerland. I had also read the news that from that summer all mobile operators in the EU were supposed to abolish roaming, but I never found clear information on whether they had actually done so. In the end I came across the option of ordering a travel SIM. I had always been cautious about them because they are usually expensive and there is a fair chance that the card gets lost in delivery. Still, I decided to try it. It was DrimSIM.
Its tariffs are still more expensive than Orange if you calculate strictly per megabyte. But how often do you go on a trip with a prepaid traffic package and use it exactly up to the very last day? Usually you either fail to use all of it or use it up completely and then have to search for another SIM card in a place where you may not be able to buy one at all.
This operator has one huge advantage: you pay only for the traffic you actually use. You can download just 10 KB during the whole trip while mostly relying on Wi-Fi in cafes and hotels, and in the end you pay only for those 10 KB. On this trip, using DrimSIM, we spent 600 RUB on traffic, not counting the cost of the SIM itself or delivery. Normally we had spent 2,000 to 4,000 RUB on internet, so this helped us save money and also remained useful for future travels. Before buying it, you absolutely have to check the rates for all the countries you are going to visit. Along our route the price was almost the same everywhere: 1 euro cent per megabyte. There was only one place where we had to turn the SIM off in advance, and that was Monaco. The rates there were absurdly high. Luckily, we crossed that country quickly and stayed without internet only for a short time.
I use a mobile router to share internet to several devices at once. I should say right away that there were some issues with it, because it could not run the software stored on the SIM or change certain settings depending on the country, so from time to time I had to move the SIM into a real phone and adjust things there. It is better to practice this in Russia beforehand. Incidentally, mobile traffic in Russia is also cheap: the same 1 euro cent per megabyte.
I like to travel prepared, and when you are on the road not knowing where to buy a SIM card or whether anyone will even sell you one on the spot, it does not inspire much confidence.
Accommodation
This time I approached the accommodation search from a different angle. I had heard that in the part of Europe we were heading to, hotels are expensive and cheap cabins are not nearly as common as they are in Norway. So we were prepared in advance to stay in a tent quite often. But how do you find campgrounds? There are many of them, but signposts are almost nowhere to be found. We could have searched online, but I did not want to spend much traffic on that, and in some places there might not have been internet at all. So I used the site `https://ru.camping.info/mesta-dlia-kempinga?open=map` as a base, parsed all its campgrounds, saved them into a file, and opened it with MapsMe. That gave us an offline map with 14,000 campgrounds. Some of them had prices listed, and that helped us look for something reasonably affordable. In the end the cheapest campground cost us 10 euros per night for a car, a tent, and two people, while the most expensive one cost 46 euros, but it was only 30 meters from the Mediterranean coast, and that was worth paying for.
I may already have written this in articles about earlier trips, but I will repeat it: we found a cheap way to travel. When you sit at home and search for hotels in advance, the prices are intimidating. But we do not do that. We look for hotels on the move, one day or even less before check-in. Of course, there are fewer options left by then, and there is a risk of finding nothing at all, but in that case we have a tent and plenty of campgrounds along the way. Quite often we find good hotel deals when they are trying to dump prices and sell off rooms that nobody booked. Also keep in mind that it is much easier to find a room for one night than for two or more, because a single room may already have a schedule of incoming guests with gaps of 1 to N days. The more nights you are trying to book, the more likely it is that everything is already taken and you will find nothing at all.
Trip cost
This trip turned out to be not as expensive as New Zealand or Norway. Over 3 weeks we spent 157,000 RUB, which I think is quite reasonable. Here are the main expenses:
- 42,800 accommodation
- 41,600 fuel
- 16,000 entertainment
- 11,500 roads
- 10,000 supermarkets
- 9,500 visas
- 6,900 insurance
- 6,700 cafe food
- 4,500 vignettes
- 4,000 parking
- 2,070 mobile connection
- 1,270 miscellaneous
- Total: 156,840 RUB.
Accommodation was the most expensive part. Even though we often stayed in a tent, it still turned out less cheap than we had expected for that format. The reason was simple: campgrounds in Europe are expensive, and hotels are even more expensive. On average the campgrounds cost us about 25 euros per night, though there were cheaper ones at 10 to 12 euros, but not many. Hotels in France and Austria cost us between 50 and 62 euros, and anything more expensive than that we simply did not consider, switching to a campground instead.
As for fuel, it is cheap in Russia and then similarly priced in Belarus, only slightly more expensive because of the currency conversion fee. After that comes Poland, where fuel is more expensive than in Belarus but still cheaper than in most of the other countries we visited. So we tried to fill up well about 100 km before the next border. There things are not exactly like in Russia. Fuel is cheaper in towns than on highways, but you should not fill up too close to the border because there it can actually be more expensive. Also, do not forget that if you pay by card and they offer you a choice of transaction currency, you must never choose RUB, because that leads to double conversion markup. Always choose the currency of the country you are currently in.
We ended up spending 6,700 RUB on food in cafes. In our opinion, the most expensive food was in France, while Belarus, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria were not that bad. Still, eating out every day requires a lot of money. We only used cafes occasionally when we had no time to cook. For cooking on the road we bought groceries in supermarkets, which cost us 10,000 RUB overall. Food in supermarkets was not as expensive as in Norway or New Zealand and only slightly more expensive than in Russia. But let me remind you that we had brought the basic long-lasting products with us: pasta, cereals, nuts, salt, and sugar.
There were many toll roads along our route. Those toll roads themselves were in France and Austria, and the scenic ones were especially beautiful, while in countries such as the Czech Republic, Austria, and Switzerland we simply had to buy vignettes to drive there. In Austria we additionally paid about 46 euros for one beautiful high-mountain road and another paid section besides it. People also say there are toll roads in Poland, but for some reason we never encountered them.
There were also paid parking lots on our route. Most of that money was spent in Paris. Parking there was very expensive, while everything else was cheaper.
Links
Driving In Europe
- Driving in Europe
- A good site about travel in Europe
- Calculate the cost of driving across France
- Check whether your car supports European fuel
- What to do if you are left without money and documents abroad
Camping Search
- Campgrounds working with a discount card
- Campground map
- Article about campgrounds in Europe
- About campgrounds