0পরিকল্পনা একটি ইউরোপীয় ড্রাইভিং ছুটির দিন

আমি সম্প্রতি আমাদের ইউরোপীয় ড্রাইভিং ছুটির দিন সম্পর্কে লিখেছে এবং মানুষের একটি দম্পতি যেহেতু পরিকল্পনা প্রক্রিয়া সম্পর্কে কিছু আরো বিস্তারিত তথ্যের জন্য আমাকে বলা হয়েছে. যতক্ষণ না মানুষ ঠিক একই ট্রিপ করতে চান, বিস্তারিত অনেক ভিন্ন হবে, কিন্তু পরীক্ষা চাবিকাঠি জিনিস একই থাকা. আমি কীভাবে আমাদের ছুটির পরিকল্পনা করেছি এবং কী কী সরঞ্জাম এবং সাইট ব্যবহার করেছি সে সম্পর্কে এখানে আমি বিশদ করব, আমাদের ট্রিপ থেকে নির্দিষ্ট উদাহরণ সহ

ভূমিকা

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) হল Skyscanner. I set Sky­Scan­ner alerts for a 2 আগস্টের ক্রেট সপ্তাহের রিটার্ন এবং বেশি সময় ধরে এটা ট্র্যাক 9 মাস, dur­ing which time it var­ied between £229[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“229”] এবং £ 280[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“280”]. আমরা ক্রীট উড়ে হলে আমরা একটা গাড়ী ভাড়া করা প্রয়োজন হবে, আমরা সবসময় অতীতে যেমন. একটি মৌলিক ছোট গাড়ির গাড়ি ভাড়া গত বছরের € 400 ছিল[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“400”] সঙ্গে 121গাড়ী ভাড়া, which has­n’t changed sig­ni­fic­antly since 2009, যখন একটি টয়োটা Aygo € 359 ছিল[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“359”] থেকে 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.

যাত্রার আনুমানিক খরচ

I star­ted by put­ting our start and end points into Google Maps, which sug­ges­ted the drive (done without diver­sions or stop offs) হবে 2,400 মাইল প্রতি উপায়. From this I sub­trac­ted the dis­tance trav­elled on the sea cross­ings of the chan­nel and the Medi­ter­ranean (35 এবং 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 প্রতিটি উপায় বা 4,320 সর্বমোট.

Next I needed an estim­ate of the eco­nomy of our car. The car in ques­tion is a Vaux­hall Astra 1.7 dies­el eco car, তাই এটি প্রশংসনীয় ভাল মাইলেজ কত পায়. আমি কটাক্ষপাত ছিল Hon­est­John for the offi­cial extra-urb­an MPG (62.8) and also a more real­ist­ic estim­ate of what MPG we might achieve, যা নিষ্কাশিত 52.7mpg করা. I assumed we’d be using air con­di­tion­ing and knocked a bit off for this as well and went with a fig­ure of 48mpg.

পরিশেষে, I did some con­ver­sions to estim­ate that at 48mpg we’d need 90 gal­lons of fuel, অথবা 410 লিটার. At cur­rent UK prices (£ 1.45[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“1.45”] তাই প্রতি লিটার) যে প্রায় ঠিক £ 600 খরচ হবে[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“600”], বা £ 150[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“150”] প্রতি. So far so good — well under budget, কিন্তু আমরা প্রয়োজন চাই 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”].

পরিশেষে, আমরা ক্রীট গ্রীস থেকে একটি খেয়া প্রয়োজন. 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 ক্রিট দিন. An overnight ferry with 4‑bed cab­in and the car was €577[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“577”] প্রত্যাবর্তন. This actu­ally dropped to only €400[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“400”] সময় আমি বুক দ্বারা, but I did­n’t know this when estim­at­ing the jour­ney cost. At the sum­mer 2013 বিনিময় হার (কাছাকাছি 1.15) এই € 577 প্রায় ঠিক £ 125 সমার্থক হবে[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“125”] প্রতি, 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”] টোল এবং € 24[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“24”] করের দুইভাবেই জন্য. 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) থেকে Toll­Tick­ets. I got tax for Hun­gary and Aus­tria from Toll­Tick­ets and both worked flawlessly.

স্থান অবচয় দেখার জন্য

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 মাইল! অতিরিক্ত সময় এবং অতিরিক্ত খরচ 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 যাওয়া, so I star­ted look­ing along our 2 জায়গা থাকার জন্য নতুন রুট. 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) কাছাকাছি ছিল 34 hours. তাহলে আমরা ছিল 4 days each way this would aver­age to 9 hours of driv­ing each day. সঙ্গে একটি 7 ঘন্টা ঘুম এই আমাদের ছেড়ে চলে যেতে হবে 8 ঘন্টা খাওয়া, 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. আমরা পরে এই নিজেদেরকে দিতে সংশোধিত 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 স্থান বন্ধ থামাতে. তৃতীয় স্টপ বন্ধ গ্রীস দ্বিতীয় শহর হয়ে ওঠে: 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. আমাদের দিয়েছেন 2 long jour­neys, এথেন্স Dubrovnik থেকে (an estim­ated 14 hours) মিউনিখ ব্যাক যুক্তরাজ্য (শেষ 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, প্রায়ই খুব ধীর ছিল. 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

আবাসন

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, Dubrovnik, ভেনিস এবং মিউনিখ. I estim­ated ini­tially that it would cost around £20[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“20”] per per­son per night (বা £ 120[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“120”] প্রতি) for the accom­mod­a­tion which would take our grand total (minus spend­ing money for food and drink) পর্যন্ত £ 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 (তাই কোন রুমের), 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 একটি মেট্রো মাইল, sub­way, or rail sta­tion we could use to get into each city. I tried sev­er­al sites like শীর্ষ 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”] পিপি. আমি ব্যবহার Hostel­World এবং 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. মধ্যে 2 instances it was cheap­er to book through booking.com for the same accom­mod­a­tion which I did.

গাড়ী ও সংশ্লিষ্ট কাগজপত্র প্রস্তুত করা হচ্ছে

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, ম্যাসাডোনিয়া, 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^য় party insur­ance at the bor­der. In Mace­do­nia this cost €50[worldcurrency curr=“EUR” value=“50”] এবং আলবেনিয়া € 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. তথাপি, our exper­i­ence is that you can pass through without a prob­lem and with­in 10 মিনিট আপনি ক্রোয়েশিয়া মধ্যে ফিরে এসেছি

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. দ্য এএ have use­ful guides to each coun­try as well as a sum­mary which include details of the equip­ment required. Our even­tu­al list of items was: সাবধানবাণী ত্রিভুজ, প্রাথমিক চিকিৎসার সরঞ্জাম, reflect­ive vest inside the car, head­lamp con­vert­ers (এবং স্পেয়ার্স), GB প্লেট (এবং খুচরা), অগ্নি নির্বাপক, অতিরিক্ত বাল্ব, অতিরিক্ত ফিউজ, 2 breathalysers, কাতা দড়ি, V5 car regis­tra­tion doc­u­ment, ড্রাইভার লাইসেন্স (উভয় অংশ), insur­ance cer­ti­fic­ate, and green­card. We also decided to get inter­na­tion­al drivers per­mits, যদিও কোন-যেখানে আমরা তাদের প্রয়োজনীয় গিয়েছিলাম. একটি নিছক £ 5.50 জন্য[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“5.5”] we felt it was anoth­er doc­u­ment that might help pre­vent any delays or dif­fi­culties with for­eign offi­cial­dom. এই তালিকার আইটেম অনেকেই বেশ সস্তায় একটি এএ ব্র্যান্ডেড কিট হিসাবে কেনা যাবে (e.g. থেকে মর্দানী স্ত্রীলোক). এ থাকাকালীন-আপনি-অপেক্ষা আইডিপি পাওয়া যাবে কিছু ডাকঘরে — you will need your drivers license, a pass­port photo and proof of iden­tity (we used our pass­ports). পরিশেষে, আমরা একটি সস্তা পেতে করার সিদ্ধান্ত নিয়েছে wind­screen shade for the car as we did­n’t want a super­heated steer­ing wheel or seat belts when we came back to the car, যেমন অতীতে ভাড়া গাড়ির সঙ্গে আমাদের ঘটেছিল.

অন্যান্য অপরিহার্য অ্যাডমিন

• Check your pass­port isn’t with 6 months of expiry — if it is, এটা পুনর্নবীকরণ.
• 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, এটা নাও বিনামূল্যে প্রতিস্থাপিত!
• 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. প্রায় ইউরোপের সব 1 যুক্তরাজ্যের ঘন্টা এগিয়ে. গ্রীস হয় 2 এগিয়ে ঘণ্টা.
• 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 এবং Acci­dent­S­ketch.

মুদ্রা

Nor­mally only 1 cur­rency is required for going abroad, কিন্তু আমরা মাধ্যমে ক্ষণস্থায়ী হয় যেমন 18 coun­tries we real­ised we could­n’t make do with just the Euro. Quite a few European coun­tries still use their own cur­ren­cies, এবং আমরা একে কিছু প্রয়োজন হবে. 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^য় 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, কার্ডে, বা ইউরোর সঙ্গে.

ব্যবসা-জ্বালানী

Buy­ing fuel in Europe is much like in the UK — pull in, পূরণ করা, বেতন, এবং বন্ধ ড্রাইভ. 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”] লিটার. Our cheapest tank was bought in Mace­do­nia at just under £1[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“1”] লিটার! 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 জ্বালানীর দাম-ইউরোপ 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, এটা বেশিরভাগ দক্ষিণ-পূর্ব ইউরোপ ছিল. I will def­in­itely invest­ig­ate this pri­or to a future trip.

খাদ্য

ইউরোপ পাশাপাশি যুক্তরাজ্যের দেশে খাদ্য পরিবেশিত হয়. 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. আমি খুঁজে পাওয়া যায় একটি 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. আমি আগে আমরা বাম গাড়ী খাবার একটা তালিকা তৈরি, where I delib­er­ately tried to leave out very sug­ary foods (which tend to res­ult in a sug­ar low and then argu­ment!). আমরা যে খাবার crumbs প্রচুর ড্রপ এড়ানো বা একটি জগাখিচুড়ি করতে চেয়েছিলেন (e.g. bread or cher­ries), খাবার যা গলে বা চটচটে যেতে (e.g. chocol­ate) এবং খাবারের একটি ফ্রিজ ছাড়া দ্রুত বন্ধ হয়ে যেতে হবে (যেমন মাংস). The list I came up with served us sur­pris­ingly well: বীজহীন bagels, আপেল, Haribo মত মিষ্টি, টাকশাল, Nuts, শুকনো ফল, গরুর মাংস ঝাঁকুনিপূর্ণ, তারা বার ছিল, Crisps, ছোট বাদাম কাটিবার যন্ত্র (e.g. Ritz বিস্কুট)

চূড়ান্ত বিবরণ

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: প্রাগ, বুদাপেস্ট, এথেন্স, ক্রীট, Dubrovnik, ভেনিস & মিউনিখ. 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 (যার একটি উদাহরণ নিচে). 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.

কিভাবে ভাল অনুমান ছিল

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 মাইল. Our ori­gin­al route estim­ate (after tak­ing into account diver­sions to vis­it places) ছিল 4,630 মাইল (একটি নিছক 300 miles more than the most dir­ect route). অতিরিক্ত 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. Vikos ঘাট থেকে). 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 (যে জন্য আপনার দম রাখা না!)

পরিশেষে, I’d like to note that my ori­gin­al com­par­is­on with a 2 সপ্তাহে ফ্লাইট + 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. সাবধানবাণী ত্রিভুজ) 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, এবং £ 50[worldcurrency curr=“GBP” value=“50”] টোল কম, 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 + গাড়ী ভাড়া হচ্ছে £ 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 এবং Seat61 look like good places to start…