Settling the first stone!

Headed to STA first thing after biotech lab to check out the availability of flight dates; cos’ we checked out KLM’s site yesterday night and there were available seats, though slightly more expensive due to increase in taxes.

And there were seats! But it was $2104 per pax, about $200 more than KLM’s direct bookings. Slight problems with loading one of KLM’s booking pages though.

We’ll get the ISIC card on Monday, so all we have to do is:

• fill in the form
• bring our original IC? passport? and matriculation card
• photocopies of matriculation card and IC? passport?
• SGD15 each

Our original plan was to head down to J3 Travel after pharmacotherapy lecture and enquire about air tickets, Eurail passes etc and head back for biotech lecture, but we decided to ring up J3 Travel and P2P Travel (recommended by Miao Juan – Thanks muchly!) to check out via phone instead.

So we camped outside LT24 at the soccergame thing table; Jingwen tried calling J3 while I rung up P2P.

No response from J3 Travel even after several tries. No one answered the phone.

Enquiries at P2P Travel was much more smooth sailing; we could get the seats (refer to Flight Details, KLM) on our selected dates and the price quoted ($1754 per pax) was much more reasonable, though it was the exact same flight as STA recommendations.

Minor hiccups when we decided to purchase out tickets through P2PTravel:

• Couldn’t book online through P2PTravel’s website as the flight option wasn’t stated, and decided to call to reserve seats
• The lady on the line told me to call back later (and didn’t after 30 min)
• So called the agency again, this time we had this very helpful lady, Ms. Sindy Koh who advised us to send her an online enquiry. And so we did!
• Prompt reply from Ms. Sindy, but the price quoted turned out to be $1995 instead of the other price quoted by her colleague.

Ohwells, the prices would be comparable to direct booking online through KLM, but decided to go ahead and reserve tickets with P2PTravel, and we’d have to confirm our booking and payment by 1st April.

Decided to get the Eurail Select Pass (Youth): 15 days for 463 Euros from STA instead, as they had a promotion (1 day free when purchased before 31st March). But we’ll have to pay in full before 1pm on Monday. So it’s down to STA on Monday again!

. . .

To Do:

P2PTravel:

• Call before heading down (tentatively tomorrow) to make payment of air tickets 

STA on Monday, meeting at 11am to:

• Cancel seat reservations
• Purchase ISIC
• Purchase Eurail Select Pass (15 Days)

. . .

Still have much planning to do!

The first stone in the journey

Went down to STA travel in sci coop today to enquire about airtickets with Gf.

And we got the shock of our lives!

the earliest ticket back to Singapore is 12 Aug night holland time, which mean we will reach singapore on 13 Aug. And, school has already started. Even worst, we have to take the Tube and go under English Channel to catch a plane from London back to Singapore. Sounds cool.

Seriously if there’s no school, no FYP ,  no dance matters to handle , I would be glad to stay there for a longer period and maybe tour London at the same time.  Never mind the fact that living expenses in Europe will be expensive. I mean, how many times do i get to go over to Europe? But, I wanna come back to Singapore quick and have a good break, some time with family before year 4 begins…..

Hence, we had a 3 hr Emergency meeting in my room right after school. And after much deliberation. here’s the final plan.

We will only visit Netherland (where we would be based in Utretch), Belgium, Luxembourgh and Germany. Scrapped Switzerland off our plans although we would very much want to visit The Alps. But guess money and practicality rules above anything else. At least that leaves us with one more options for our honeymoon destinations in future.HAHA.

After much contemplation with the airlines, we’ve decided to check whether J3 tours still has flight by KLM. Hopefully with the dates that we want at 1180 bucks for a return trip. Good thing with KLM is the direct flight to Amsterdam. no transit. no worries of being late in catching our flights and what other problems that WE DO NOT want cropping up.

If not, we will haf to book direct from KLM website at $1420 per pax with airport taxes accounting to $517. Expensive. arGh.

As for Eurailpasses to travel around Europe. We’ve decided to invest in a 15 flexible days in 2 months to 5 countries package. Not that we would be going to 5 countries. But more so for the days that it allows us to travel. And with it, we can also go to Switzerland and buy a Swiss pass there if we were to decide on a last minute that Germany’s too boring for our liking.

known cost for the Eurail pass is Euro 463. Unknown costs include the citypasses within the different cities. Apparently they have 1 pass for each city or so. But our host has told us that there’s a pass for 20 trips within the whole of holland for just 20 euros. That would be very beneficial as compared to what we read in guidebooks, where each pass is for a duration of 24 hours, 48 hours or 72 hours for each city.

For now, there’s tests and loads of lab reports to do.
But things that we need to do include:

• a detailed plan on where we want to visit
• how many days to spend at each city
• where do we stay? Tentatively, we would be travelling throughout Netherlands, and part of Belgium. Find a place at Belgium and use it to travel to Belgium and Luxembourgh. And two places, preferably based in Frankfurt and Berlin, where we will explore Germany.    

No visas are needed on this trip. Yays. Save on cost. 

Assuming that we’re booking direct from KLM website, then the known cost for now will probably be around SGD$2909.30.

Shocking.

Guess we have to live on breadcrumbs already in order to spend within our $5k cap. 

Hopefully there would be no more problems cropping up and that this journey will be smoothsailing. Although I guess a valuable experience gain from SEPs would be the problems that crop up out of no where and the process of solving them and reaching our final destination.