London and a bit of Paris

We had an amazing first stop of our trip in London. We saw so many things! The crown jewels, the tower of London, St Paul's Cathedral, the British museum, the Tate Modern, the Imperial War museum, the Borough market, Brick Lane and Portobello market.

We did several walking tours around London one all about Jack the Ripper, one around all the big sights in Westminster like Big Ben and Buckingham palace. We went to see Sweeney Todd the musical which was amazing.

We ate a lot of tasty food including meat pies, fish and chips, fresh food from the markets and even some curries.

We got to visit with some of Jerome's cousins, and rode a crazy ride with them.

We arrived in Paris Saturday night and walked a long way to the Eiffel tower and luckily got to it about 10 minutes before they turned all the lights off!

Yesterday we did a bit of the Louvre, the musee de l'Orangerie to see Monet's water lilies and climbed up the Arch de Triomphe for a great view. Had dinner in the little apartment we are staying in of baguette, brie, tomatoes, wine and berries. And gave our feet a much needed break from all the walking!

And we're off...!

10 hour direct flight to London, arriving at 7AM. Hopefully, we'll get some sleep on the plane, otherwise Monday's going be a long day.

Laura packed everything yesterday (while I cleaned up the house). We bought packing cubes and they really help keep our bags organized.  Our packs are 60L, but they only weigh about 20 lbs each. We actually wish we had smaller bags that would fit into airplane carry-on, but we already had these ones.  Oh well - lots of extra room in them for souvenirs I guess!

One of Laura's friends shared an awesome tip with us - rent a car to go to the airport.  A taxi to the airport costs us about $100, shuttle would cost $45 (but it stops to pick up other passengers).  It only cost us $18 to rent a car from SJC airport and drop it off at SFO!

Where are we going?

We've been using Google Spreadsheets and MyMaps to plan our trip.

We use Google Spreadsheets to track everything: our detailed itinerary (including hotel and travel reservations), todo lists, expenses, contact information.  Spreadsheets is sync'd offline to our phones, so we'll be able to view it, even without a data connection.

We've been using Maps mostly to figure out where to go. I really liked using directions to come up with very quick route options.  Here's some of the routes we rejected:

• Up to Scandanavia and down through Eastern Europe
• England and Ireland, Germany, Croatia, Italy, Spain and Portugal

We were originally thought about renting a car and driving the whole time.  Renault has a program that allows you to rent a brand new car for a long period of time quite economically (almost as cheap as a railpass).  We ended up deciding against driving because:  1) cars are a burden in big cities 2) we have more flexibility without a car - we can easily pick up cheap flights ($80/pp from Warsaw to Rome!)

Below is the latest iteration of our route.  Up until Morocco, our plans are fairly solid. We're still working on where exactly we'll go in Morocco, Spain and southern France.  Blue lines represent trains or buses.  Orange lines are flights.  Blue markers are places we're staying, pink markers are places we might visit as day trips.

View Jerome and Laura's Trip to Europe in a larger map