How planning a trip is like a lion tracking a gazelle
You know, there are times during all of this posting and planning where I must sound pretty neurotic.
Fact is, sure I have my anxious moments, but for the most part I feel all right about all this Euro-planning stuff. A little nervous at times, but ultimately confident it will all work out.
For me, all this mental ranting and rendering is actually how I come at a problem. I do not usually write it all down; that part is new. Figuring out a solution to something, a website, this trip, just about anything really, usually entails kicking around lots of things, looking at different angles, pondering. I think of it as a predator circling its prey.
The lion does not run at the herd. It walks around it, for a long time, apparently doing nothing, until it knows which one it is going to take. Then it moves once.
Why the circling is the work
People planning a first long trip tend to think the planning is a list of decisions to be made in order: dates, then route, then passes, then beds. It is not. Each one changes the others. You cannot pick your dates until you know whether you care about the Alps in snow. You cannot cost the pass until you know how many long hops you are making. You cannot fix the route until you accept how much you are cutting.
So you circle. You look at it from the money angle, then from the weather angle, then from the how-tired-will-I-be angle, and each pass makes the shape a bit clearer. It looks like procrastination from the outside and it is not.
The failure mode at each end
Circle too little and you book a route that fights itself: four countries in nine days, three of them requiring reservations you have not costed.
Circle forever and you never pounce. At some point the research stops paying and you are just enjoying the safety of not having committed. The tell is when you start re-reading things you have already read.
Two decisions end the circling, in this order: buy the flight and book the first two nights. Everything after those is adjustable from the road. Almost nothing before them is real.
And the Eurail Blog? A chance to pretty much put an open conduit from my head to you. Hopefully you are finding something useful, something to think about, to do or not do, or to put to use when planning your own trip.
Posted 18 April 2003 by Ant in Eurail Planning · updated by Chris