The Adventures of Team H

We're boarding our flight to Rome one week from today!

Over the last six weeks since the previous post (can that be right?), we've been locked in that ongoing rat race, doing some holiday stuff, and sneaking in a moment of trip planning every now and then. All our Italy arrangements are now in order, we have our global GSM phone, our Eurail passes, voltage converter, two 4GB digicam chips, tasteful walking shoes, Target brand warm accessories, and what remains a very rough plan for Austria and Germany (mainly involving castles and dark beer).

Our hope is to get some photos up here every few days, depending on the internet cafe situation and our technical savvy, given we've decided to leave the laptop behind.

Now, if this final week evaporates as fast as the others, the next thing we know we'll be at the airport and on our way!

On October 30 our deliberations ended: "We're going to Europe now -- this December".

It's all too easy to spend years saying you'll go someplace someday. But that day we'd finally realized, after a couple years of trying to squeeze a Europe trip into our busy lives, that it was finally, at this moment, not impossible to just do it. This will be our first (major) European vacation; before we met, Lauren had been to France as a college student, and I had once visited Iceland (Yes they're indeed part of Europe and proud of it!), but that's the most of Europe we've seen to date.

So, here's a rough sketch of the Rapid Planning process, and where we stand so far...

1. Decided on a basic 2-week "Central Europe by Eurail" itinerary: Rome, Florence, Austria, Bavaria/Munich, and Prague. Then we figured we should add an extra few days for good measure, giving us about 2.5 weeks.
2. Bagged some Delta tickets immediately. Then we finally gave the calendar some real scrutiny and noticed our trip was actually a full 3 weeks! Oops! Nobody protested (importantly, nobody on "Team H"), so we went with the new and improved 3-week plan...
3. Did a bit of frantic, unfocused web research. Happily stumbled across Rick Steves' cool site.
4. Hit Barnes & Noble and picked up "Insight" guides on Rome and Austria to start with (very readable!), plus a couple of Italian and German phrasebooks. I devoured the Rome book and now know my Vespasian from my Trajan...
5. Lauren found the site tickitaly.com. Using them we grabbed tickets for the Colosseum tour and Museums in Florence (Uffizi & Academie)

And now, we're borrowing all the Rick Steves DVD's we can scrounge up, aiming to settle on some good hotel options pronto.

Countdown to departure: less than 7 weeks to go!...

* [Over-30 newbie blogger. Mostly Web 2.0- illiterate. You've been warned.]