Sunday, May 30, 2010

Waiting to Go

Nothing to be done.

It's Saturday night. I leave early Monday morning. After weeks in a constant state of panic over trip preparations, I have reduced the items on my to-do list to just one: pack. And I can't possibly start packing until tomorrow.

My passport lies inert on my dresser, stamped with a shiny Russian visa: single-entry, one month. My meticulously organized folder containing all travel and accommodation reservations awaits me from my desk. I am suspended between the chaos of planning and the chaos of actually traveling. Waiting.

Tomorrow, I pack, and then re-pack, and then obsess over whether or not I've packed all the right things and how much it all weighs. Then I distract myself spending time with friends and family, all the while secretly and greedily absorbed in thoughts of my next day's adventure. Then I prudently put myself to bed early and barely sleep a wink. And then, on Monday, I leave the country.

I'm very excited. I'm very nervous. And with nothing left that I can possibly do, the anticipation is a little overwhelming. Like the feeling I had on Christmas Eve as a 7-year-old, when I sneaked out of bed to discover the tree already brimming with presents I couldn't open till morning.

It seems interminable, but Monday will come soon enough, and suddenly the days will fly by, leaving me wondering if I ever had a spare second to just sit around and wait. So here's proof for my future self: here I sit, waiting.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Planes, Trains, and A Whole Lotta Time to Kill

With exactly three weeks remaining before my trip, there could be no better time for my first blog post than when the chaos of planning a month-long venture abroad has left me craving a verbal catharsis. And planning is certainly a stress. As I recently discovered, traveling on a budget means traveling creatively and not necessarily in comfort. I have just finalized my itineraries to and from St. Petersburg, which I will euphemistically describe as "roundabout." Before I describe the route I will subject myself to, let's compare how much I could have spent on a plane ticket.

The cheapest semi-direct round-trip flight from Detroit to St. Petersburg I could find at the time I was booking cost a hefty $1550. Fares were typically cheaper out of Chicago, but that left me with the problem of traveling to and from Chicago—an added hassle hardly worth the $100 I would save. Then, I discovered an online booking site (contact me for the name) whose only goal is frugality, casting comfort and reasonable connection times aside. The cost of the airline ticket I wound up purchasing: $950. That's right, I saved six hundred dollars.

Before you start cheering in vicarious delight over my mad savings, allow me to lead you through my trip's labyrinthine itinerary. First, the multi-hundred dollar savings were only possible by booking a flight departing from Chicago O'Hare, so I had to buy train tickets to Chicago after all—an additional $51 round-trip, after saving $9 with my ISIC card. Fortunately, the Amtrak station in Ann Arbor is literally across the street from my apartment, so stumbling sleepily onto a train at 7am won't be a problem, even with luggage. Unfortunately, Amtrak's Union Station in Chicago is 18 miles away from O'Hare—18 miles that I will traverse by a CTA train for another couple dollars each way. So this is what I'm looking at:

Monday, May 31
7:30am - 11:30am — train to Chicago
12pm - 1:15pm — subway across Chicago to airport
6pm — depart Chicago for Manchester, UK (roughly an 8-hour flight)

Tuesday, June 1
7:30am — arrive in Manchester
6pm — depart Manchester for Helsinki, Finland (about a 3-hour flight)
10:30pm — arrive in Helsinki

Wednesday, June 2
10am — depart Helsinki for St. Petersburg (a breezy 1-hour flight)
12pm — arrive in St. Petersburg

(The return trip, leaving Petersburg at 7pm on June 30 and arriving in Ann Arbor 11pm on July 1, is basically identical, except with a shorter stop in Paris to replace the connection in Manchester.)

In case you weren't paying attention, that comes out to 2 days in transit. Why so long? In a word, layovers. In Manchester, the time between flights is about 10.5 hours; in Helsinki, nearly 12 hours. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how to save $600 in peak traveling season.

A pessimist might consider this an itinerary from hell, or, at the very least, an inconvenience not worth the money saved. And admittedly, I'm expecting to arrive in Russia more than a little bedraggled after 4 hours on a train, an hour on a subway, 12 hours in the air and more than 27 hours in purgatory, for a grand total of 44 hours between Ann Arbor and St. Petersburg (keeping in mind that my final destination, Vytegra, is still another 250 miles east of that).

But, being the unflaggingly cheerful person I am, I prefer to look on this as an adventure. As an American citizen, I can travel anywhere in the EU without a visa for 3 months or less. And since the largest part of my luggage will be checked during my connections, that means me, my carry-on bag, and my American passport have free range of Manchester for the better part of a day and Helsinki for an entire night. On the return trip, I get another 10 hours in Helsinki and about 5 hours in Paris. In my mind, rather than submitting to an excruciating itinerary to save a couple hundred bucks, I managed to extend my trip from one country to four and I saved money in the process! Why hullo, England! And kiva tavata sinut, Finland!

For any travelers considering similar discount itineraries, I will recount my experiences, good and bad, but honestly, I couldn't be more excited. Forget a direct flight; I booked an adventure, and as long as I spend less than $500 between Ann Arbor and St. Petersburg, I have saved money in doing so. Now all I have to do is plan the details between my arrival in Russia on June 2 and my departure on June 30 (which will include two 10-hour bus rides and a couple bouts on the metro, adding to the tally of different modes of transportation I will use). There is a lot to be decided and only three weeks left—time I will spend gathering strength and dramamine for my 44-hour odyssey to St. Petersburg.