Part of the purpose for this blog post is to inform you all about being smart when it comes to traveling, and the other is to remind myself to never do what I did again. I’ve referenced them before and I’m going to do it again, but Kara and Nate are these full-time YouTube travelers that make probably some of the best travel content I’ve seen on the internet.
One of the things they do sometimes (although less often now than they did before, I believe), is they spontaneously buy flight tickets to various places and figure out accommodations afterwards. It sounds like a great way to travel and explore new places, but when you have a relatively strict itinerary, it’s probably not the best way to travel.
When I first found out where I was going to be placed during my time as a Fulbright grantee, I spent some time making travel arrangements. I booked my flight to Germany, which landed in Berlin, and then I bought a train ticket that would take me to Wolfsburg. I arranged plans with Veit to come pick me up from the train station in Wolfsburg, so in an ideal situation it didn’t seem very difficult. I also planned my trip to and from the program’s orientation site, which was in the area of Cologne.
I purchased a FlixTrain ticket to get from Berlin to Wolfsburg upon my initial arrival because that was a little cheaper than the German train company called Deutsche Bahn. If it were an ideal world, catching my train wouldn’t have been very difficult. However, the world is far from ideal.
None of my flights were delayed, luckily, but my train connection was within an hour and a half from when I landed. The bags took a little longer than I expected them to come out (because Tegel Airport and airports in Berlin in general are terrible), and I ended up only having about an hour to get to the train station. This wasn’t the worst itinerary, considering Tegel is only a half hour away from the central train station (Hauptbahnhof), where I had to catch my train to Wolfsburg, but it still felt like I had to rush a little to get there.
Fast forward one week to my trip to Spain. I had booked a spontaneous trip to Madrid to visit friends, as I explained in my update post. My flight to Madrid was simple enough, and I was able to get from the train station to Tegel with plenty of time to spare. However, I didn’t book any way for me to get back to Wolfsburg after my return flight. While I thought to myself, “I can just take a train after my flight, it shouldn’t be a big deal,” I should have actually looked to see what my options actually were.
When I looked on the Deutsche Bahn’s website the day of my flight, only then did I realize that no train’s went to Wolfsburg after 9 pm. I made different arrangements based on my flight itinerary to get a train to Magdeburg, a different German city that was only an hour away from Wolfsburg, and booked an Airbnb there, because ultimately that was cheaper than staying in a last-minute hotel room in Berlin, the party capital of the world, on a Saturday night. The train was far enough away from my landing time that I should have had some time to wait at the train station before boarding my train.
But then, after I bought this backup train ticket and non-refundable Airbnb, I got a notification from my airline, EasyJet, that said my flight would be delayed by about an hour, which gave me only about 40 minutes to get to the train station. I tried to call the airline to see if there was any type of reimbursement if I missed my train because of the delay, and on the phone they said they couldn’t help me because the delay wasn’t more than three hours. When I went to the airport in Madrid and asked again, they gave me a reimbursement form. There was definitely something that wasn’t understood by the agent when I called earlier, but that’s beside the point.
Anyway, once I got on the plane, I made a plan to try to get to the train station as fast as possible. I got on the bus as quickly as I could, and was able to make it to my platform with 10 minutes to spare.
Then, one week later on my way back from my orientation I had a similar problem, but this one was more of my own doing. I booked a flight from Cologne, where my orientation program took place, to Berlin, and booked a Deutsche Bahn train from Berlin to Wolfsburg. I did this around the time when I found out where I was placed, so this itinerary was pretty set in stone. The transfer time I had from the airport to the train station was around an hour and 15 minutes, which, at first, I thought wouldn’t be a big deal. What I only realized after the fact was that my Ryan Air flight would be landing at Berlin Schönefeld, which, with public transportation, is about 50 minutes outside of the city. Again, if everything went perfectly I would make my train, but also, I was leaving things up to chance.
When I landed at Schönefeld I literally ran from the bottom of the steps on the tarmac to the Schönefeld train station, bought my ticket, and was just able to get on the regional train to take me to the central train station, where my Deutsche Bahn was. What was supposed to be about a 7-minute walk turned into a three-minute run from the airport terminal to the airport’s train station.
I had to get off at the East Train Station (Ostbahnhof) and switch to an S-Bahn (the street train). But here, the signs weren’t very clear which platform my S-Bahn was going to be on, so I missed that train. Luckily, another train that went in the same direction came a few minutes after that, and I was able to reach my train to Wolfsburg with 5 minutes to spare.
So, when it comes to traveling under a certain itinerary (I had to get back to Wolfsburg on the last day of orientation because I had to go into THG early the next day), it is SUPER IMPORTANT to plan your travel accurately. This probably was something that I should have known already, and I thought I did, but there were things I didn’t take into consideration. For Spain, I didn’t realize that I couldn’t take a train to Wolfsburg from Berlin after a certain hour. Coming back from orientation, I had forgotten about how long I would actually need to transfer from Berlin’s other airport to the train station.
If I had taken the time to plan out all the logistics accordingly, which I thought I had done, instead of speeding through the trip planning without any review about the itinerary is comfortably possible, I could have saved myself from a huge headache, and maybe, more importantly, saved money. Many European cities have airports that are relatively far from the city center, like Budapest, for example.
One last thing. This was something I knew, but yet another thing I overlooked. I arrived back in Wolfsburg on a Sunday when I traveled to Spain, which is the day when all grocery stores are closed in Germany. And after having spent a week in Spain, there was nothing good left in the fridge. Again, something that could have been avoided and where I could have saved money if I had properly planned.
So, even though you can’t plan for everything (you might face some delays in flights, for example), really try to plan what you can so that you don’t have such crazy transfer stories like I did within the span of three weeks. It’s certainly cheaper and much more enjoyable when you don’t have to stress about making your next flight/train.
Teacher Tommy's Travels 