TRAFALGAR TOUR: EUROPEAN CAVALCADE

TRAFALGAR TOUR: EUROPEAN CAVALCADE
Nov-Dec 2009

The Trafalgar tour is a coach (comfy bus) tour across various parts of the world. Me and my wife Julie joined the European Cavalcade where you travel to 10 countries in Western Europe for 17 days! (5,700km!)

COST SAVER
There is a reason why the Trafalgar tour we joined is called "cost saver" and a reason why we get to see so much in such a few days.

1) COACH RIDES
At least 4 hours a day is spent in the bus with stops every 2 hours. The trip from Austria to Rome was the longest I believe which was at least 8 hours on the highway! You are discouraged to use the restrooms in the bus, so during stops, we spent at least a Euro (for both of us) to use the toilets! I was glad when we arrived in Italy and France where the restrooms are free!


Four hours a day!

2) HOTEL ROOMS
The hotel rooms are enough to keep you warm and give you a hot shower, but some of the hotels are really the "bare necessity type" hotels. These hotels are normally located far from the center and close to the highway where the bus could maneuver better and leave the area faster (avoiding morning traffic) to go to the next country or tourist area. There were times when we were lucky to get the "NON-COST SAVER" hotel because the cheaper hotels closed down during winter. The fast pace of the tour means you have to pack at least twice every three days, sometimes spending as little as 9 hours in your hotel room (sleep, wake up, eat then leave).

3) FOOD
Breakfast was normally cold food (cereal, milk, bread, cheese) which does not go well with our Asian stomachs. We found ourselves looking for boiled rice wherever we went, hehe. I always thought of myself as someone who could live a couple of weeks away from my normally Asian cuisine, sadly I was mistaken. My stomach started looking for my boiled rice. Meals are eaten on the run whether in a gas station highway cafe, the restaurants in the tourist areas or the stalls selling fast food. Taking too long to eat makes you lose valuable time that is given in each destination to roam around and actually tour.


Cold breakfast not meshing well with our Asian stomachs!

4) OPTIONAL TOUR
Buy them all! You already traveled all the way to Europe and paid for all the expensive stuff like hotels and the coach ride and the plane ticket. Missing out on something is the last thing you want to do. The optional tours are not cheap and if you compute the boat tickets/train tickets/etc, trafalgar is charging at least double the actual costs. You can say to yourself "If I just traveled alone and bought these tickets myself, I would have saved a lot!", but one has to remember the fact that if you traveled alone, you most likely would not have reached the nooks and far places that a coach tour can bring you to. One also has to remember that it would even be more of a waste if you missed the chance to actually see something rather than just listening to the tour guide and looking at the city or tourist spot through the bus window.

My only criticism of the optional tours is how those who were not able to afford it missed out on a lot. The descriptions on the trafalgar tour book are a bit misleading. The two worst situations were:

Trafalgar tour book description "our morning guided sightseeing tour includes views od Champs Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral." When they say "view", they mean it! It was a view of the structures mentioned FROM INSIDE THE BUS!"

Sorrento - Capri: We traveled a good number of hours from Rome to go South (inside Italy). The things we did for that particular day was a tour of Pompeii (optional) and a boat trip with a short 1 hour tour of Capri Island (also optional). For those who did not take these optional tours, the trip (of at least a day and 200km or more) was technically just to see the south of Italy inside the bus and to sleep in your hotel!

Take my advice, pay for ALL the optional tours and enjoy them all. The overpricing should be ignored and charged to the WHOLE TRIP costs and not just to each optional tour. It would be more expensive if you traveled all the way back to Switzerland just to go up Mt. Pilatus (optional tour) when you could have just done it with the tour.


They weren't kidding when they said "see" Dover Hills. We did see them, from inside the bus and on the ferry!

CONCLUSIONS:
Despite the not so ideal situation that was described above, me and my wife loved the tour. It was the cheapest possible tour that we could get that gives us the chance to see so much of Europe! Traveling alone may be cheaper, but places especially in the Germanic area will be hard to visit alone as they are quite far apart. Places like Switzerland and Austria, these places are not the typical places you add on your self-made tour as they are quite far from the more tourist places like Italy and France where there are more things to see. A coach tour has advantages as well because the bus can fix a route that passes through some of the "in-between places" such as the ruins of Pompeii, the leaning tower of Pisa, Monaco, Versailles and others. The Trafalgar tours of Europe, especially the European Cavalcade, are good tours that can give you a good first impression and experience of Europe. Knowing how the system works in the many different countries makes it easier to travel alone to Europe in the future. Experiencing the different systems and cultures in the various areas can help your future travel plans in deciding which area/country to re-visit and to stay longer in.


A shot from inside the coach

For other photos and blog entries of other places we went to in the European Cavalcade Trafalgar Tour, please click the links below:

Holland/Netherlands
Germany
Switzerland
Liechtenstein
Austria
Italy
Other parts of France
Paris