0التخطيط لعطلة القيادة الأوروبية

لقد كتبت مؤخرًا عن عطلتنا الأوروبية في القيادة وقد طلب مني شخصان منذ ذلك الحين بعض المعلومات الأكثر تفصيلاً حول عملية التخطيط. ما لم يريد الناس أن تفعل بالضبط نفس الرحلة, العديد من التفاصيل ستكون مختلفة, ولكن الامور المهمة للتحقق لا تزال هي نفسها. سأشرح هنا كيف خططت لعطلتنا وما هي الأدوات والمواقع التي استخدمتها, إلى جانب أمثلة محددة من رحلتنا

المقدمة

The ori­gin­al idea for the trip was at least partly inspired by the rising cost of flights to Crete. A return flight now costs around £250 dur­ing the sum­mer hol­i­days. The best site I am aware of for find­ing cheap flights (and track­ing their price) هو SkyScanner. I set Sky­Scan­ner alerts for a 2 الأسبوع عودة إلى جزيرة كريت في أوائل أغسطس وتتبعت ذلك لأكثر من 9 months, dur­ing which time it var­ied between £229[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“229”] و£ 280[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“280”]. إذا كان لنا أن يطير الى جزيرة كريت كنا بحاجة إلى استئجار سيارة, كما لدينا دائما في الماضي. كان تأجير السيارات من السيارات الصغيرة الأساسية في العام الماضي 400 €[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“400”] مع 121تأجير السيارات, which has­n’t changed sig­ni­fic­antly since 2009, عندما كانت تويوتا أيجو 359 €[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“359”] from TheBest­Cars. The basic cost of a hol­i­day to Crete for 4 people would there­fore be about £320[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“320”] — £380[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“320”]. Any driv­ing plan would have to be reas­on­ably com­par­able to this for me to “sell it” to my fel­low travellers.

تكلفة رحلة من المقدر

I star­ted by put­ting our start and end points into Google Maps, which sug­ges­ted the drive (done without diver­sions or stop offs) سيكون 2,400 ميل في كل اتجاه. From this I sub­trac­ted the dis­tance trav­elled on the sea cross­ings of the chan­nel and the Medi­ter­ranean (35 و 205 miles respect­ively accord­ing to google) to get an estim­ate of the total “land miles” we’d need fuel for which came in at 2,160 كل طريقة أو 4,320 في المجموع.

Next I needed an estim­ate of the eco­nomy of our car. The car in ques­tion is a Vaux­hall Astra 1.7 dies­el eco car, لذلك يحصل الأميال جيدة. كان لي نظرة على Hon­est­John for the offi­cial extra-urb­an MPG (62.8) and also a more real­ist­ic estim­ate of what MPG we might achieve, التي تحولت إلى أن تكون 52.7mpg. I assumed we’d be using air con­di­tion­ing and knocked a bit off for this as well and went with a fig­ure of 48mpg.

أخيرا, I did some con­ver­sions to estim­ate that at 48mpg we’d need 90 gal­lons of fuel, أو 410 ليتر. At cur­rent UK prices (1.45 £[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“1.45”] أو حتى للتر الواحد) التي من شأنها أن تكلف بالضبط تقريبا 600 £[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“600”], أو 150 £[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“150”] كل. So far so good — well under budget, ولكن كنا بحاجة أيضا 2 fer­ries each way.

We decided to get the Eur­o­tun­nel ser­vice across the chan­nel which ended up being just over £240[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“240”], altho had we booked it earli­er it would have been closer to £150[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“150”]. So this took our total per per­son up to £210[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“210”].

أخيرا, نحن في حاجة إلى العبارة من اليونان إلى جزيرة كريت. These run day or night and it is pos­sible to book a cab­in for either voy­age. As both myself and my part­ner suf­fer with sea sick­ness we decided to travel at night with a cab­in — whilst more expens­ive this would save us a night of accom­mod­a­tion in Athens and give us an extra 2 أيام في كريت. An overnight ferry with 4‑bed cab­in and the car was €577[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“577”] إرجاع. This actu­ally dropped to only €400[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“400”] بحلول الوقت الذي حجز, but I did­n’t know this when estim­at­ing the jour­ney cost. At the sum­mer 2013 سعر الصرف (حول 1.15) هذا € 577 ما يوازي تقريبا بالضبط 125 £[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“125”] كل, tak­ing our total per per­son up to £335[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“335”].

There was one final num­ber to take account of — unlike the UK many European coun­tries charge tolls or require road tax. Invest­ig­at­ing this was the most chal­len­ging part of the plan­ning, but was made con­sid­er­ably easi­er once I dis­covered ViaMichelin which provides impress­ively accur­ate pri­cing for both tolls and taxes. ViaMich­elin sug­ges­ted we would require €60[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“60”] للرسوم و24 €[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“24”] للضرائب في كل اتجاه. This equated to approx­im­ately £35 per per­son in total. This took my estim­ated jour­ney grand total up to £370[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“370”] each — with­in my tar­get price range!

I also dis­covered that many taxes could be paid in advance (and auto­mated toll passes obtained) from Toll­Tick­ets. I got tax for Hun­gary and Aus­tria from Toll­Tick­ets and both worked flawlessly.

اختيار أماكن للزيارة

Hav­ing estab­lished the viab­il­ity of our plan, and giv­en approv­al by the oth­er trav­el­lers, I star­ted to look in more detail at what route we might go. I quickly decided there was­n’t much point in trav­el­ling in the same dir­ec­tion each way — we’d be bet­ter to take more of a “loop” to max­im­ise where we could vis­it. I looked at the “dir­ect route” map and quickly noticed that it passed to the east of Croa­tia and Aus­tria, both places I wanted to vis­it. The route also passed to the west of the Czech Repub­lic and Hun­gary which I was also inter­ested to vis­it. A more West­ern route through Croa­tia and Aus­tria only added 100 miles to the jour­ney, and a more east­ern route through the Czech Repub­lic and Hun­gary only added 80 اميال! الوقت الاضافي وتكلفة اضافية 180 miles was a fairly insig­ni­fic­ant frac­tion of our 4,300 mile total made the decision very easy — we’d take the 2 routes and see lots of inter­est­ing places on the way.

We had nev­er planned to drive all the way in 1 اذهب, so I star­ted look­ing along our 2 طرق جديدة لأماكن للبقاء. The cri­ter­ia were fairly simple — we wanted to stay near sig­ni­fic­ant pop­u­la­tion centres as these are where most tour­ist accom­mod­a­tion is found, and the wider the choice the bet­ter value we could get. There were also lim­its to how long we could stay in a car for if we wanted to have a prop­er bed to sleep in each night. Our total jour­ney time each way (exclud­ing the ferry to Crete) كان حوالي 34 hours. لو كنا نملك 4 days each way this would aver­age to 9 hours of driv­ing each day. مع 7 النوم ساعة هذا من شأنه أن ترك لنا 8 ساعات لتناول الطعام, refresh and see the loc­al area. Whilst this would be quite a hec­tic peri­od we decided it was worth it as we could spend 4 days trav­el­ling each way and have 8 days relax­ing in Crete. عدلنا هذا لنعطي لأنفسنا في وقت لاحق 5 days on the return jour­ney based on the lower qual­ity of some of the roads.

With the above cri­ter­ia in mind I looked along our route for places we could stay that we also wanted to see. On the East­ern route we wanted to see Prague, and also see some fam­ily near Bud­apest so I selec­ted these as 2 أماكن لإيقاف. أصبح إيقاف إيقاف ثالث المدينة الثانية في اليونان: Thes­saloniki as it was right next to the route and split the jour­ney from Bud­apest in half. The only down­side to this plan was the mam­moth jour­ney on day 1 from Shef­field to Prague, a jour­ney of over 900 miles tak­ing an estim­ated 16 hours.

On the west­ern route I was very keen to see Dubrovnik, the Adri­at­ic coast and the Alps. I was also quite keen to see some­where in Ger­many with Munich being the obvi­ous choice on our route. The most obvi­ous place to stop off between Dubrovnik and Munich was Venice and this was a no-brain­er to add as none of us had been before. وقدم لنا 2 long jour­neys, أثينا إلى دوبروفنيك (an estim­ated 14 hours) وميونخ دعم المملكة المتحدة (على 800 miles and an estim­ated 14 hours). We decided not to attempt the Athens to Dubrovnik jour­ney in 1 go as we knew we had to cross through Albania which has chal­len­ging roads and poten­tial boder cross­ing delays. We wer­en’t keen to stay in Albania so we elec­ted to stay in north­ern Greece near Ion­an­nina. This had the added bonus of giv­ing us a bit more time in Athens, and I also dis­covered that there is a very impress­ive 1km deep gorge near Ioan­nina which we could add to out list of places to see.

The last detail to decide was which dir­ec­tion to travel. We decided that we’d rather do the longest jour­ney first (Shef­field — Prague) and we had also heard the bor­der cross­ing head­ing south from Italy via Slov­e­nia to Croa­tia, في كثير من الأحيان بطيئة جدا. When we actu­ally passed it com­ing the oth­er dir­ec­tion the queue of cars was over 4 miles long — we’d really dodged a bul­let! So we opted to take the more east­ern route first, and return via the more west­ern route

الإقامة

The next task was to find accom­mod­a­tion at each of the places we were plan­ning to stop off. Our accom­mod­a­tion for Athens was effect­ively sor­ted by using the ferry overnight, and our accom­mod­a­tion in Hun­gary was provided by fam­ily. This left me to find accom­mod­a­tion in Prague, Thes­saloniki, Ioan­nina, دوبروفنيك, فينيسيا و ميونخ. I estim­ated ini­tially that it would cost around £20[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“20”] per per­son per night (أو £ 120[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“120”] كل) for the accom­mod­a­tion which would take our grand total (minus spend­ing money for food and drink) تصل إلى 480 £[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“480”] — a very reas­on­able price when com­pared to a 2 week pack­age hol­i­day to south­ern Europe!

We wanted private accom­mod­a­tion (لذلك لا غرف النوم), but oth­er than that we really just needed a bed. We did­n’t want to drive into major European cit­ies, which can be very stress­ful in a UK car, but we wanted to be able to vis­it them quickly from where we stayed, so my cri­ter­ia for accom­mod­a­tion was that it should be loc­ated on the out­skirts near to a motor­way we’d be trav­el­ling on, and it should be with­in 1 ميل من المترو, sub­way, or rail sta­tion we could use to get into each city. I tried sev­er­al sites like اكسبيديا and some of the sites advert­ised on the TV like Trivago but these typ­ic­ally came up with prices around £50[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“50”] ص. أود أيضا أن تستخدم Hostel­World و Hostel­Book­ers, which des­pite their names, both find all types of accom­mod­a­tion. My sis­ter had recom­men­ded these when she had spent 3 months inter-rail­ing in Europe sev­er­al years ago. They were excel­lent and I was able to find accom­mod­a­tion meet­ing my cri­ter­ia in each city. في 2 instances it was cheap­er to book through booking.com for the same accom­mod­a­tion which I did.

إعداد السيارة والأوراق ذات الصلة

It goes without say­ing that you will require insur­ance for driv­ing in Europe. We already had European cov­er as part of our insur­ance, if you don’t you will need to con­tact your insurer. If you are plan­ning well in advance you may well have your insur­ance renew­al due before you travel which gives an oppor­tun­ity to find a new deal which includes European cov­er at bet­ter value than your cur­rent insurer. The usu­al price com­par­is­on sites are great for this — I always go via Money­Saving­Ex­pert to see which com­par­is­on sites are the best to use.

Once you are insured for Europe you will need to check which coun­tries your route goes through — your European cov­er might not cov­er all of them. European cov­er will cov­er all EU coun­tries and may cov­er a few oth­ers, but is unlikely to cov­er every­where. Our cov­er did­n’t cov­er us for Albania, مقدونيا, Montenegro or Bos­nia. It may be pos­sible to get addi­tion­al cov­er for some coun­tries — you will need to con­tact your insur­ance com­pany to find out. I man­aged to get cov­er for Montenegro for an addi­tion­al £35[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“35”]. This cov­er is provided with what is known as an “inter­na­tion­al green card”. Even if you are only trav­el­ling to coun­tries which are covered by stand­ard EU cov­er it is worth get­ting a green card from your insur­ance com­pany as some loc­al police forces will ask for one and are likely to delay you if you don’t have one. A good example of some­where like this is Ser­bia. We found ourselves unable to get cov­er for Albania, Mace­do­nia and Bos­nia. This is a very com­mon state of affairs for most West­ern European insur­ance com­pan­ies, and the coun­tries in ques­tion provide a leg­al altern­at­ive — you can buy 3^{بحث وتطوير} party insur­ance at the bor­der. In Mace­do­nia this cost €50[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“50”] وألبانيا € 27[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“27”]. Bos­nia did­n’t require cov­er as we were driv­ing along the nation­al road from Croa­tia back to Croa­tia (Croa­tia is split in half by a 7 mile wide cor­ridor giv­ing Bos­nia access to the Sea). The actu­al leg­al status of this road is unclear — Croa­tia and Bos­nia both signed the “Neum Agree­ment” which in the­ory means if you stay on the road you stay in Croa­tia, but neither coun­try rat­i­fied the agree­ment. بغض النظر, our exper­i­ence is that you can pass through without a prob­lem and with­in 10 دقائق كنت مرة أخرى في كرواتيا

Once you have made arrange­ments for insur­ance in each coun­try you pass through you will need to make a list of required equip­ment. Many European coun­tries require items like warn­ing tri­angles to be car­ried at all times. ال AA have use­ful guides to each coun­try as well as a sum­mary which include details of the equip­ment required. Our even­tu­al list of items was: مثلث التحذير, حقيبة إسعاف أولي, reflect­ive vest inside the car, head­lamp con­vert­ers (وقطع الغيار), غيغابايت طبق (وقطع), طفاية حريق, المصابيح الغيار, الصمامات الغيار, 2 breathalysers, سحب حبل, V5 car regis­tra­tion doc­u­ment, رخصة السائق (كلا أجزاء), insur­ance cer­ti­fic­ate, and green­card. We also decided to get inter­na­tion­al drivers per­mits, على الرغم من عدم حيث ذهبنا طلب منهم. لمجرد £ 5.50[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“5.5”] we felt it was anoth­er doc­u­ment that might help pre­vent any delays or dif­fi­culties with for­eign offi­cial­dom. العديد من العناصر في هذه القائمة يمكن شراؤها باعتبارها مجموعة AA ذات العلامات التجارية بسعر رخيص جدا (e.g. from الأمازون). ويمكن الحصول على النازحين بينما أنت بين الانتظار في بعض مكاتب البريد — you will need your drivers license, a pass­port photo and proof of iden­tity (we used our pass­ports). أخيرا, قررنا أن الحصول على وسيلة رخيصة wind­screen shade for the car as we did­n’t want a super­heated steer­ing wheel or seat belts when we came back to the car, كما حدث لنا مع استئجار السيارات في الماضي.

المشرف الأساسي الآخر

• Check your pass­port isn’t with 6 months of expiry — if it is, تجديد العمل به.
• Don’t for­get to get travel insur­ance.
• Take your European health insur­ance card. Before set­ting off check that the EHIC is still val­id — if not, احصل عليه استبدال مجانا!
• Con­tact your bank / cred­it card com­pany and noti­fy them of your travel plans to ensure they wont block the use of your card abroad.
• Con­tact your mobile phone pro­vider and make sure you can use calls and texts abroad — this might not be on by default. You may also want to turn voice­mail off as some pro­viders charge you if someone leaves you a voice­mail whilst you are abroad!
• Don’t for­get time changes in your travel plan­ning. تقريبا كل من أوروبا 1 قبل ساعة من المملكة المتحدة. اليونان 2 قبل ساعات.
• We also took with us prin­ted cop­ies of European Motor Acci­dent Report forms in a range of lan­guages. As far as I’m aware these aren’t leg­ally required, but they make a lot of sense to have just in case you have an acci­dent. They can be down­loaded in a range of lan­guages from CarTravel­Docs و Acci­dent­S­ketch.

دقة

Nor­mally only 1 cur­rency is required for going abroad, ولكن كما كنا مرورا 18 coun­tries we real­ised we could­n’t make do with just the Euro. Quite a few European coun­tries still use their own cur­ren­cies, وكنا بحاجة إلى بعض من كل. I was­n’t keen to carry lots of dif­fer­ence cur­ren­cies for most of the jour­ney so planned to keep it as min­im­ised as pos­sible. I e‑mailed each of the places we had booked to stay to find out if the accep­ted cred­it card. Where they did I arranged to pay on my Post Office Mas­ter­card. I got this card sev­er­al years ago primar­ily because for­eign trans­ac­tions aren’t sub­ject to a charge and are exchanged at the offi­cial Mas­ter­card daily rate — basic­ally the same as the offi­cial exchange rate. Money­Saving­Ex­pert have an art­icle ded­ic­ated to the best deals for for­eign trans­ac­tions which is worth read­ing. We even­tu­ally settled on Czech Coruna and Croa­tian Kuna in addi­tion to the Euros we were tak­ing. We opted not to get Hun­gari­an For­ints, Ser­bi­an Dinar, Mace­do­ni­an Den­ar, Albani­an Lek or Bos­ni­an Marks. I made sure that any­thing we would need in these coun­tries could be paid on card or in Euros (for example the Mace­do­ni­an 3^{بحث وتطوير} party insur­ance was paid in Euro cash and the toll roads in Mace­do­nia and Ser­bia were paid on cred­it card). Whilst my writ­ing about this sec­tion is quite short, the actu­al plan­ning was quite sub­stan­tial — I had to anti­cip­ate any­thing we might need money for in each coun­try and check if it could be paid for in advance, على بطاقة, أو مع يورو.

الوقود شراء

Buy­ing fuel in Europe is much like in the UK — pull in, يملأ, دفع, وتنطلق. How­ever there are a few things well worth know­ing. Out­side the EU there are often 2 or more grades of “Dies­el”. You don’t want to put the really cheap stuff in a mod­ern Dies­el car — its designed for older HGVs and will not do good things to your car! Dies­el that is of the same grade as stand­ard EU dies­el is some­times called “Euro Dies­el” — if you see “Euro Dies­el” being offered then opt for this. That does­n’t mean you have to get branded “premi­um” fuels either though. Dies­el is help­fully called Dies­el or Dizel in every coun­try (except France who of course have to invent a new word — Gazole) as it is named after a Ger­man gen­tle­man who was called Dies­el. I can­’t tell you about pet­rol but gen­er­ally look for the 95 octane stuff which is avail­able everywhere.

The price of fuel var­ies sub­stan­tially across Europe. Gen­er­ally speak­ing Dies­el is cheap­er than pet­rol (in a reversal of typ­ic­al UK prices). Our most expens­ive tank was bought in the UK at £1.40 [world­cur­rency curr=“GBP” value=“1.4”] للتر الواحد. Our cheapest tank was bought in Mace­do­nia at just under £1[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“1”] للتر الواحد! I did quite a lot of research in advance to find fuel prices in dif­fer­ent coun­tries, and loc­at­ing spe­cif­ic pet­rol sta­tions along our route. A good start­ing point for prices is الوقود الأسعار-أوروبا which will give you a rough idea of prices in each coun­try. Rather than actu­ally tie ourselves to spe­cif­ic pet­rol sta­tions I found “best prices” for each coun­try, worked out which coun­tries we should fill up in and which we should­n’t, and then used the “best price” as a tar­get as we drove. We aimed to pay no more than the equi­val­ent of 3p per litre above the best price for each coun­try and were very suc­cess­ful in doing so.

I had­n’t anti­cip­ated that “duty free” fuel would be avail­able between some bor­der cross­ings. I did­n’t make a note of loc­a­tions at the time, but there were sev­er­al bor­ders with pet­rol sta­tions in between selling fuel for very low prices. This obvi­ously does­n’t apply to bor­ders between EU coun­tries which are barely bor­ders at all, كان معظمهم في جنوب شرق أوروبا. I will def­in­itely invest­ig­ate this pri­or to a future trip.

طعام

يتم تقديم أوروبا فضلا عن المواد الغذائية والمملكة المتحدة. Des­pite his fears, our veget­ari­an travel com­pan­ion was always able to find things he liked, as was I des­pite my intol­er­ance of vari­ous dairy related foods. I did a bit of research before trav­el­ling and con­cluded the European ser­vice sta­tions are gen­er­ally a lot bet­ter than UK ones, and cer­tainly no worse. There are fre­quent fast food options (Sub­way, McDon­alds etc) and a lot of Itali­an AutoGrills (which are a slightly high­er grade of fast food). There is also the highly rated Ger­man Nord­see, a fish and sea­food fast food chain. كما أنني وجدت ل art­icle by Heston Blu­menth­al recom­mend­ing some spe­cif­ic ser­vice sta­tions. As much as pos­sible we ate a good break­fast and a good even­ing meal in the cit­ies we were stay­ing in, and snacked on food we took with us in the car dur­ing the jour­neys. We also had a few sandwich+crisps+drink deals at ser­vice sta­tions. أنا قدمت قائمة من الأطعمة السيارة قبل مغادرتنا, where I delib­er­ately tried to leave out very sug­ary foods (which tend to res­ult in a sug­ar low and then argu­ment!). أردنا أيضا لتجنب الأطعمة التي تسقط الكثير من فتات أو جعل حالة من الفوضى (e.g. bread or cher­ries), الأطعمة التي تذوب أو الذهاب لزجة (e.g. chocol­ate) والأطعمة التي من شأنها أن تنفجر بسرعة دون ثلاجة (على سبيل المثال اللحوم). The list I came up with served us sur­pris­ingly well: الخبز الخالي من البذور, تفاح, هاريبو تشبه حلويات, النعناع, Nuts, الفواكه المجففة, لحوم البقر متشنج, كان لديهم القضبان, يجعد, المفرقعات الصغيرة (e.g. بسكويت ريتز)

التفاصيل النهائية

I made maps for each city we vis­ited, includ­ing the loc­a­tion of our accom­mod­a­tion, the main tour­ist attrac­tions, and the main pub­lic trans­port routes. They are all avail­able on google maps: براغ, بودابست, أثينا, كريت, دوبروفنيك, مدينة البندقية & ميونيخ. I took prin­ted cop­ies of these with our travel doc­u­ments. I also made a set of fact sheets for the roads of each coun­try which could be stuck onto the dash board (ومثال على ذلك هو أدناه). These included the speed lim­its, any require­ment to use head­lights, the drink drive lim­it, the loc­al cur­rency and exchange rate, the loc­al name for Dies­el, and any oth­er rel­ev­ant notes (e.g. that speed cam­era warn­ing sys­tems are banned in France). I would also recom­mend a sim­il­ar sheet with details of a few basic words and sen­tences in each loc­al lan­guage although I did­n’t make one for our trip I will in future.

جيدا كيف كانت التقديرات

It’s not much good plan­ning a hol­i­day based on my sys­tem for estim­at­ing if my estim­ates ended up being way out. So below I’ve pro­duced a table of my ori­gin­al estim­ates for the vari­ous costs, what they ended up cost­ing, and any reas­ons for a discrepancy.

We ended up driv­ing 5,160 اميال. Our ori­gin­al route estim­ate (after tak­ing into account diver­sions to vis­it places) كان 4,630 اميال (مجرد 300 miles more than the most dir­ect route). اضافية 530 miles were racked up driv­ing in Crete itself, driv­ing the scen­ic route along the Croa­tian coast and tak­ing a few drives to places along the way (e.g. لVikos خانق). In future I would make an ini­tial estim­ate the same way I did this time and then add 10% for these kind of trips to get a more accur­ate estimate.

Altern­at­ively, it would be reas­on­able, with a sim­il­ar vehicle, to estim­ate a cost of around 14p[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“0.14”] per mile assum­ing cur­rent fuel prices remain rel­at­ively stable (لا تحبس أنفاسك لذلك!)

أخيرا, I’d like to note that my ori­gin­al com­par­is­on with a 2 رحلة في الأسبوع + car hire price worked out abso­lutely bang on the estim­ate of £370[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“370”] (if you exclude the need for main­ten­ance on our car and the extra miles we choose to do). We now have the required car equip­ment (e.g. مثلث التحذير) so that is a 1‑off expense. In future we’ll also save money by using the cross chan­nel ferry rather than the Eur­o­Tun­nel and avoid­ing the French roads. A sim­il­ar hol­i­day in future should come in at about £180[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“180”] less for the chan­nel cross­ing, و£ 50[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“50”] أقل في رسوم, mak­ing an estim­ated total of £315[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“315”] per per­son. The ever rising cost of flights makes this an almost guar­an­teed bet­ter deal. The num­bers even become worth­while with only 3 people shar­ing: the estim­ate of a flight + تأجير السيارات يجري 370 £[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“370”] and the estim­ate for driv­ing being £420[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“420”].

Next time we might invest­ig­ate how tak­ing the train com­pares. Bahn.com و Seat61 look like good places to start…