The Silver Lining in the Recession Cloud

When the recession first hit I panicked. It was the last thing I needed when I was trying to gather the dollars for the trip. Hubby being self employed didn't help as the trade dropped right off. However, I soon discovered that the recession being global was working in my favour. Suddenly the dollar went from being worth 45 British pence to 58, then 59, and even went over 61 pence at one stage. So I decided I would pay for as much as I could in advance. Much of the accommodation I booked, being B&B's didn't have card or Paypal facilities and preferred payment on arrival. So I researched the cost of admission into the myriad castles, stately homes and museums only to find their prices exorbitant. So I turned back to my fellow forum members at Simple Savings (see banner at top of page) and asked for their suggestions. It turned out I could purchase a card for each of us that would get us into almost every British Heritage site, and another advantage was that with the card you don't have to queue for tickets. Yay! When I went over the attractions that we would definitely be visiting I found the cost for the two of us was approaching $1,200! The GB Heritage pass was only $700 for two. So naturally I ordered them online. Then another Simple Savings member told me about the London Pass and London Transport card. These were purchased for around $240 all up, making another estimated saving of around $200 on the London attractions. This includes Thames river cruises to Windsor Castle plus entry; places like St Paul's Cathedral, Tower of London, all the museums, etc were included. Plus I was able to buy tickets for a tour of Buckingham Palace for only $12 each.

We were intending to stay in London for four days but accommodation in the city was prohibitive. That is until a Simple Savings member told me about the London Universities taking in visitors. I found accommodation at Imperial College for $100 a night for the two of us. This was half the cost of everywhere else I had tried. Plus it has its own cafes and restaurant, gym etc, which we can access. The gym is free.

The best saving due to the recession was car hire. Booking online directly with Hertz saved us a fortune. We were quoted less than 1000 pounds for 56 days hire, all inclusive. That is around $1,800. Booking a Brit Rail pass would be $1,300 each for 2 months access, and you still need to be able to get to the stations. Even a Navman GPS unit was only $120 bought from a UK website, complete with UK maps. (This was the $350 model, if bought here in Australia.) Hertz wanted $400 to hire one from them for 56 days! We will pay the $80 to download the Aussie maps when we return.

Everything I checked out was much cheaper than it would have been prior to the recession. So I was more than happy. The next thing to do was check out the currency exchange rate and we found we could get around 120 pounds more per $1000 than the same time a year earlier. This was going to make our holiday so much more affordable. It was even better when the Euro fell, too. Italy was looking really good!

Absence makes the heart grow fonder???

Sorry folks. I have had trouble logging in, had to change passwords twice, etc, etc. Anyway, sorted now so will be updating soon. Not right now though, as it is a bit late in the evening. Enough to say we have only 39 sleeps (who's counting?) now, so I will have to get busy to get this up to real time. Will be back tomorrow. Goodnight! And thanks for reading.

The REAL Trip of a Lifetime!

So it was decided we would still go to Italy. France will be on the itinerary for the next trip to Europe, possibly in 2012/13. I bought an Italian language CD from Aldi, cost $12. Hubby and I have had a couple of sessions with it but always end up in fits of giggles, at the mispronunciations we make. We will persevere.

Another dimension had been added to the plan. I had to include a visit to Oxford, or Banbury, to be precise, in order to meet up with my newly-found sister and her family. Yes, folks, I had discovered a whole family of people I had never met before and was dying to spend some time with them. I had been searching for my natural father for many years and had given up in the end. Then one day, late in 2008, my daughter was doing family tree research and decided to put out a request for information on the Trip Advisor notice board, of all places! She had seen there was a forum in the area in which I was born. Within two weeks she had emails asking why she was looking for the writer's father! This turned out to be only surviving daughter of my real father. The other two sisters had died, as had my Dad. It turned out my sister was living in the USA, along with 3 of her adult children, but has a son living in Banbury, Oxfordshire. There was also a niece and nephew from a deceased sister to meet with in Nottingham, which is the town where I was born.

After much shock, excitement, etc., my new sister agreed to travel to her son's home so we could meet up on my trip. This was now a huge priority for me and was really going to be perfect, as all my kids and grandkids would be in England at the same time, so we could have a full reunion. As she is now 72, I was worried about anything happening to my sister before we could meet and had decided that if she couldn't in fact make the journey I would do a side trip to Ohio to see here in her own home.

Life throws some biggies at you sometimes, and I now had a sister, brother-in-law, several nieces and nephews and their children to fit into my itinerary. This really was turning out to be the trip of a lifetime in more ways than one.

It's all set! We are going to Italy. I can hardly believe it. I did so want to see Paris, but have made a promise to myself I will be back in Europe in a few years, and nothing will stop me from visiting France then. And anyway, hubby now has his sights set on the Excavations tour beneath the streets of Rome, among other things while I am desperate to see Michaelangelo's ceiling in the Cistine chapel. Then another bubble bursts. After having talked us into changing our plans, hubby's brother decides to pull out. First he asked us to go to Spain with them, then changed that to Rome, now he had booked a cruise with some friends instead. Grrr...

Rome or Paris, how to choose?

Did I tell you I had booked in for French lessons? Close to where we live is a French restaurant in the Mont de Lancy estate. Here was where the classes were being held. I signed up for the term, $150 which included supper. What a blast it was! My daughter and her friend attended, too, and we had a ball. My schooldays French was a bit rusty but I was one of the handful who actually had any knowledge of the language. The restaurant owner served us French bubbly and platters of French cheeses and crackers during the break and it made for some very friendly chitchat. I learned how to ask for provisions in a French shop, and to buy a meal in a restaurant. It was one of the best things I have done and I was so looking forward to travelling to Paris and practicing my newly-learned phrases...

It was not to be. C'est la vie. When I went over what we wanted to do and how much we would be able to afford I had to decide between France and Italy. My first choice was Paris of course, but my hubby's brother in England told us that he and his wife had always wanted to visit Rome and would be happy to go with us. So, rather begrudgingly, I opted for Italy. We decided on 5 days in Rome, rather than the 3 in Paris and 3 in Rome we had initially hoped for. Early research of costs was rather daunting as it became pretty obvious Rome was not cheap! I was looking at a minimum $200 a night for accommodation, no breaky included. But then, as always, Simple Savings came to my rescue.

I had been reading travel threads on the forum and one was begun for members travelling to Italy. One or two were recommending an eco-friendly backpacker place in the heart of Rome, called the Beehive. At first I was uninterested as backpacking accommodation conjures up ghastly images of shared dorms, snoring in chorus and the smell of sweaty feet. However, after reading on I was assured this was not the case in this instance. There were double rooms with shared facilities, the owners were English speaking, and the costs were unbelievably low for Rome. I went to the website to check it out and was impressed. Clean, bright, decently furnished rooms with lovely gardens, an in-house cafe and best of all, close to Termini, Rome's main railway station. The final clincher was the cost, 80 Euros a night, or around $125. The only downside was they don't accept bookings any earlier than 6 months ahead and book out very quickly. But I knew I would be on the ball for that when the time came. Italy, here we come!!!!

Okay, so I needed to concentrate on hubby's early retirement. We don't have much superannuation as hubby is self employed and we had withdrawn mine in the 90's when you still could. We had a mortgage with supposedly 8 years to go, and not a lot in savings. DON'T touch the SAVINGS! No way was I going to use the money for the holiday! I started to look at subdividing again. We had played around with the idea of selling off half of our 26oo sqm a few years before but decided it was all too hard. But now it suddenly looked like it could be the answer to the dilemma. If we could sell that, it would clear the mortgage and one or two small debts and hubby could either retire or go part time.

I have always thought there must be a good reason why we bought this place, with the huge back yard that we do nothing with. Now I was beginning to realise it was all a part of the bigger picture. That extra area was ideal for someone to build a house on and it wouldn't really affect the sale of the house when we eventually move into something smaller. I mean, 1300 sqm is still a very good sized block, even in a semi-rural area. Many of the blocks around us had been carved up into 1000 sqm lots, so ours was still a fair size in comparison. It took me a while to convince hubby that it was a good idea but in the end he went along with it and we hired a surveyor for the job.

Were we mad, or what? In the middle of a recession we start spending money on surveyors, tree lopping, council fees and the like. But I knew in my heart it was right. The only trouble is, these things take time. Boy, do they ever. Now it was less than a year before our holiday was meant to be happening and we had all this going on. Hubby's joint and muscle pain, the recession slowing down the income, the sale of the block, and I still needed to get on with making all the holiday bookings. I was starting to get a tad nervous. Was hubby right? had I bitten off more than I could chew???

It is not easy to plan for something 5 years in advance. When I told family and friends in 2005 that we were going on this big holiday in 2010 they looked at me vaguely. Even my husband didn't take me seriously at first. In fact, when I talked about it and mentioned the projected costs he became worried I was overstepping the mark. But I ignored this and plodded on with my once a month shopping, petrol savings, shopping around for cheaper utilities providers and insurance policies. Anything that would increase the level of our savings. The growth was slow and sometimes wore me down. But I kept at it and over the next few years began to see some progress. I already had an itinerary in my head and knew what I was expecting from all this but then life began to get in the way.

Hubby's physical condition was not helping my plans. His busy working day doing manual labour was now beginning to affect his health. He was experiencing a lot of pain in his achilles tendon, his neck and in the tendons in his forearms. Our GP was prescribing more and more ant-inflammatories and other drugs to help him continue to work. I slowly began to see that it would be very difficult for him to continue to work full time until he reached retirement age. I knew I needed to work on a new plan, one that would enable my husband to retire at 60, in 2010. It was not going to be easy, I was giving myself only 2 or 3 years to pay off a mortgage that was scheduled to finish in 8. For a scary few months it looked as though my holiday plans might go all aglay as the poet once said, but I was having none of it. I could do both, I was sure I could. No-one else was though. Looked as though I was on my own with this...

So I knew I wasn't going to get to Antarctica this time, nor the Caribbean but I was determined to see as many of the places on my dream list as I could. The icebergs and sexy Jamaican men could wait! A stroll down the Champs Elysees watching the beautiful people of Paris and a wander around St Peters and the amazing Coliseum in Rome was every bit as exciting to me. So I set my sights on these beautiful cities, along with the excitement and history of London and Edinburgh. I could hardly believe this was really going to happen. I prayed that life wouldn't get in the way.

Now where will we get $15,000?

Before I could really get into researching fares, accommodation costs etc, I needed to convince myself and hubby this was not going to be a wasted exercise. So the calculators came out.

When I was working full time we just spent as we earned it. There were never any savings, nothing left at the end of each week. We had holidays every year, Whitsunday islands, Surfers Paradise, Tasmania and went back and forth to England a few times but mainly to be with sick or dying parents. When I gave up working after I became ill, holidays were more difficult to afford but we still managed to get away for long weekends down the Great Ocean Road. This new challenge was a tad bigger, though, and even I felt a bit daunted by the numbers.

I had already begun to put into practice some of the hints I had picked up as a member of Simple Savings. It started with the grocery shopping. I was spending around $150 a week for the two of us but by changing from weekly to monthly shopping I found I was saving quite a lot of money. No more making several trips a week to the supermarkets meant much less impulse buying. This also meant less driving so less money spent on petrol and less wear and tear on the car. Other tips I found useful were creating a stockpile so that eventually I would have enough food in the house so that I could just shop for specials and never have to pay full price for the things we used most. Within a few months I had cut my grocery bill in half and my petrol almost in half, too. Wow, the savings were enormous! Over a year this amounted to $3,750 saved on food and $750 on petrol. $4,500 saved just like that! The $34 I had spent on my Simple Savings membership was looking like the best investment I had ever made.

Once I realised this I knew we could do it. I had five years to save the money and at that rate it was definitely possible. We were on our way! Now to get down to some serious research...