Europa!
Let me begin at the beginning.
I have been traveling to the US a lot for work, over the past one year. Paglet moved to Germany last year. Travel planners that she and her husband (N) are, they immediately started asking me to do stopovers in Germany during my trips. I confess I tried 2 times and failed, for one thing or the other. Then we decided to plan my first full fledged Europe trip instead. That's how this all began.
N is really into small, indie music festivals. He was booking early bird tickets for a festival in Italy which was going to take place in July. I said yes without knowing much about the festival and knowing my borrowerd music history.
My festival tickets got booked in Jan/Feb 2016.
I booked my tickets to and from Brussels in April.
My rough itinerary got designed in May. I included visits to some cities where I had really close friends.
I applied for visa in June.
I received my visa in July.
I dropped a few places from my plan and re-did the itinerary. And I took off for 18 days of vacation in July/August.
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| check in done and ready to board! also diy #travelgoals tees :D |
A lot apart from this happened in this short span. I was getting slammed at work. In July R got married for which Paglet flew to India. We booked her tickets so that we both (paglet and I) could fly from India to Brussels together. All this drama and planning! The month of July really was a whirlwind. We left for Mumbai from where our flight was on July 19th. It was the first time Paglet and I were traveling together. So we were both excited and anxious. Oh what a journey it was and what a blessing it proved to be to have her by my side!
To be continued..
P.S. I plan to do the entire travel cost post as well. But I understand that you don't want to wait for it. So I'll do the costing at the end of individual post.
To those wondering, I used some of my miles accumulated from the work trips to book the Europe tickets. So here is the international travel cost
Pune - Mumbai return trip by Shivneri - 1000 Rs.
Mumbai - Brussels return trip - 24,500 Rs
Internal Mumbai taxi etc - 400 Rs.
Total - 25,900 Rs.