Travel in Europe

I got an email today from a business that emails me regularly with updates and deals.  It advertised the following "bons plans," or "good ideas":

38 Euro round trip flight to Venice

37 Euro round trip to Marseille

52 Euro round trip to Berlin

76 Euro round trip to Casablanca (Morocco), from Lyon

108 Euro 5 night trip to Marrakesh (Morocco), including flight and hotel

101 Euro 5 night trip to Budapest, same thing

102 Euro, same thing to Libson (Portugal)

114 Euro, same thing to Madrid

And more.

Let me tell you, if I had someone to take with me I would be going to Marrakesh this weekend.  Literally the only thing stopping me from doing that is because, for safety reasons, I hesitate to go to Morocco without a guy.

I thought I'd share this because often Americans are either baffled or very impressed by my tendency to travel around, last minute, on my own.  It's really not hard here to plan a quick, safe trip to another country for a very low price.  There are budget airlines to get to farther-away places, and fast, efficient trains to go places nearby.  They often also have student and/or young people deals.  Every major city also has student/young people hostels which are safe and very cheap.  Finally, most major cities here have great public transportation to get around easily once you end up there.

One must also keep in mind that European countries are generally impossibly tiny compared with what Americans are used to: excluding Russia, France is the third largest country in Europe (after Turkey and Ukraine) and is smaller than Texas.  The Netherlands, for example, towards the small side but still a popular destination, is bigger than Maryland but smaller than West Virginia - it's about 16,000 square miles.

So when I pop over to London for a weekend, that is about 285 miles by train; to Brussels is less than 200 miles; to Berlin is about 620 miles.

It's easy, convenient, and quick to travel around Europe once you're already here; it's not much different from my traveling to Boston or Washington DC from NYC if I wanted to.  And with knowing English and French, I can communicate pretty much anywhere I might go.

I guess for some people it would be difficult to travel to a new, foreign city alone.  I don't really have a reason for being comfortable with that, other than that I've been doing it a long time, I've done it enough to know what to do/what not to do, and generally I prefer traveling alone, anyway.  It lets me do exactly what I want to do.

And you can see how tempting it is to go around when I get emails with deals like that all the time!