INTERRAIL GUIDE 🚂 || How to plan your trip

hello and welcome back to another video and another chapter for our intro guide this time we're going to be talking about planning your big railed adventure so discussing some of the things that you should consider when you're planning but also some of the tools that you can use to really nail down your itinerary then if you stick around to the end i'll also show you our own itinerary that we used we went on our own interworld trip last year [Music] okay so first off i just want to say ignore this screen behind me here that's just me resetting a really old pc you had lying around um so if you see stuff flashing up and all of that just ignore it uh it's been running over 24 hours now so i didn't want to turn it off before i shoot the video so i just had to make do right planning planning planning planning a potentially month-long trip that spans across multiple different countries where you might have to potentially use multiple different languages but you also have to juggle going to different places booking different accommodation finding out which trains to take which stations to get to well it all gets a bit overwhelming at the end doesn't it but don't just go and throw your planning out the window i'm a massive advocate of planning your trip before you head off on your adventure doing so will allow you to potentially save some time down the road you can travel more efficiently and most importantly you could save yourself a little bit of money as well but before we go any further if you're still not sure what interval is or you're unsure whether you want to go with interrail still i recommend you check out this video here which is the first chapter of interrail guide okay if you're still here then i assume we're all good for doing an interrupt trip but where do we begin when it comes to planning one we've already spoken about how it can feel quite daunting planning an entire interrupt trip but if you break it into these simpler smaller steps then it can really help you move in the right direction and get a clearer picture of what your end itinerary might look like so let's start with the first point inspiration it's likely that you've already been inspired in some shape or form if you're already considering it into a road trip so you might have a rough idea of what your itinerary looks like some of the places you want to see and maybe some of the activities you want to do as well but even if that's you i still highly recommend you going out there and finding some more inspiration you never know what you might find some activities some new food some new culture to discover and that new thing might point you in a completely different direction that you want to take your interim trip on for inspiration you have your usual suspects instagram youtube other social media platforms but also take a look at interrail's website too there they have lots of potential itinerary ideas with a rough number of days recommended to do each one as mentioned we'll also share our own itinerary at the end of this video so you can take some inspiration away from that but perhaps the most important place to find inspiration is speaking to your friends and family that have been to europe but if you don't know anyone that's been to europe recently or previously then drop a comment below perhaps you could connect with other people that have been to europe and if not we'll be more than happy to give you recommendations too you now should have a general idea of some of the places that might interest you and places that you might want to go to on your entire trip but don't just keep it inside your head if you're anything like me you're probably going to forget so make sure you note it down somewhere whether it's in a notepad or notebook or dropping it down on your mobile phone too keep it noted somewhere as your list will probably exponentially grow the more inspiration you find from all these different sources so now you should have a list of places you're pretty happy with you need to now rank them in order so rank them by the order that you want to prioritize them by so meaning number one should be the place you want to go to the most you want to spend the most time there if possible and just try and rank them it will be difficult don't get me wrong because you're probably going to want to go everywhere you put on this list only that's the point of the list right these are places that you've wanted to go to but still try and rank them as much as possible this will help you further down the line so it was at this point that my camera decided to stop recording sadly this meant that i lost a lot of the footage that i filmed on that day i didn't realize several days later when i went back to edit the footage that a huge chunk was missing so this is my attempt at fixing the situation i'm gonna jump back in and just patch up the bits that unfortunately cut out because i think there was quite a lot of information in there that might be useful to certain people so before the video cut off i was talking about ranking your list in order priority but once you have that start thinking about allocating a certain number of days for each of these places go for your gut feeling here don't think about it too much so let's say for example you have paris in there you know when you go to paris you want to visit the louvre you want to go photograph inside the palais de garniere maybe you want to spend a day just exploring the city and hunting down the best croissant there is that probably will take you three days and just put three days down next to paris and do this for each of the locations within your list so what might happen is you might completely overrun the amount of time you have available to travel don't worry you're not going to be the only person that's going to be in this situation we had the same experience and we had to cut a lot of places down and out of our itinerary all together my best tip when it comes to cutting down days on your itinerary is to probably just think about carrying places out all together don't spread yourself too thin on your travels by spreading yourself too thin you might not be able to get the full experience of a certain place you'll probably be better served just cutting that out and thinking about doing that place on a separate trip all together so the end goal here to try and get within the amount of time you have available to travel so let's say for example you have 30 days try and get around that ballpark figure don't worry if you're a little bit over we'll be doing a little bit more tinkering in the next few steps but try and get close to it as possible okay once you have your list and the number of days you want to spend at each of these places you want to move on to the last step which is connecting the dots perhaps the most important step out of the whole planning stage because it allows you to really visualize how your itinerary is going to play out the way i like to do this is to plot it onto a visual map the reason why this is good is because when you're looking at your list of places it's quite hard to really gauge where each place might fit into your itinerary because unless you're fantastic at geography you might not know just how far one place is from the next by plotting it into a visual map we can start shuffling places around based on each location's proximity to another and this will really help you organize your itinerary in a more geographical sensible way my favorite map to do this all along is actually on interrail's own website there's an interactive map on there that's really really great for this and it's at this point that we can jump back into the video so let's go ahead and do that so on their website under the find the best interval past view link you then put the number of travelers that you want to go don't worry about any number just put anything in there this will bring you to a nice interactive map that you can just enter the destination's name the number of days you'd like to spend there and it's just great for just a general overview of what your itinerary might look like so you input all the different places that you have on your list into the itinerary put the number of days in there and start dragging things and reorganizing things based on geographical sense so what makes more sense being next to the other place okay so you should now have a sensible looking itinerary plotted nicely out in an interactive map and it should give you a good sense of how the itinerary is going to play out so the next step now is to see if this itinerary is even possible with the trains that we have available whether there's a train station that's nearby the place we're intending to go to and if there isn't whether we're allocating enough time between getting from the train station to the intended place we want to go to as you can imagine there's a lot of pieces of information here so i recommend opening up a word document or excel sheet just to record all the information we're about to process so once you've got that ready open up the rail planner app and inside the app start inputting names of the places so point a to point b within one search you're going to get a whole array of information ranging from train times train station names whether a train needs a reservation fee or not and with that information you want to note down the train or trains that you're interested in taking so don't forget to check train stations it's really really important it's caught us out a couple of times where we've looked at the train the list of trains that have been given to us and we selected one because perhaps there was no reservation fees it was the quickest and it was traveling a good time but what we later found out was that that train was going to a specific train station that actually was probably further away than the main station that most trains go to so what you want to do once you select the train and you've got the train station names just do a quick google map search and see where that specific station is located work out roughly how long it's going to take for you to go from that station to your intended destination whether that's the accommodation you book to stay or the site that you want to directly go and see really really important that you do that because you need to allocate that amount of time within your itinerary what you might realize when you're doing this information checkup with each leg of the journey is that a certain train might just take too long whole journey might take a whole day or might require multiple train transfers throughout the day and you just don't really like the idea of spending so much of the day stuck within a train the best way to resolve this is to just add a stopover at the location yes unfortunately this does mean that you're going to have to find more time from the rest of your itinerary to allocate towards that stopover but don't just look at this negatively you might come across a place that you might not have even thought of going to originally we originally want to go straight into germany but because we were starting a trail from the uk it would have taken such a long time going from uk across the germany that we wanted to allocate a stopover halfway and that ended up being strasbourg and the alsace region of france and when we got there we completely fell in love the place and it even became one of our favorite parts of the trip all together so don't worry too much if you're adding stop overs think of them as an opportunity to explore places you didn't consider going to originally okay so we've reached the point where you can go and give yourself a pat on the back you now have an interrail itinerary that is possible given the time frame you have to travel and artillery that just makes geographical sense that you're maximizing your time most efficiently and most importantly you've got yourself an itinerary that you should really like because you've chosen places that you want to travel to so at this point you can just call it a day and use this itinerary and go out and explore europe with it but we do recommend actually i highly recommend that you revisit this itinerary over the next few days because sometimes when you're focusing on something for so long you fail to see maybe an error or two that you've done along the way or perhaps you've just not thought about a location that you really want to go to and it's just you know you've just had a mind blank and you just completely forgot about it but really that's it i'll flash up again the steps that we use to get to this stage and these are the steps that we used ourselves to create a month-long trip across i think it was seven countries and it just helped us so so much when it came to the planning stage so i hope it helps you too when it comes to planning yours okay as promised i'll show you our itinerary of where we went during the 30 days we spent in europe obviously an itinerary is just really a starting point for you to think about your own trip how detailed you want your itinerary to be depends on you as a person you might like to keep your itinerary relatively lightweight that way you have a lot of flexibility to pick and choose things whilst you're on the go i know a lot of travelers are free spirited and just don't like to get bogged down in all the details but if you're anything like us then you'll want to plan out most of the major activities you're going to do at each of the places and things you want to see but do leave yourself a little leeway because at the end of the day traveling should be an adventure it should sometimes often perhaps always be spontaneous so leave yourself some leeway give yourself a little time to go and do things that you didn't think you were gonna do at the end of the day i'm not sure yet if i'm gonna do such a thorough breakdown of each of these places and destinations and the things we did there as i think that would take a pretty long time to cover each place because we did so much but if that is something you're interested in seeing us do do drop a like in this video and subscribe to our channel and comment below letting us know that's what you want to see will be more than happy to produce it if there's enough people that want to see it so yeah that's it for this video on planning your interim trip on the next chapter of our interim guide we're going to be talking about what things to pack for your trip i know a lot of girls want to hear from other girls what they want to pack and guys want to hear from guys so i try and get sarah involved in this video too and we'll both discuss what things that we think you should pack on your interrupt trip but for now i'll see you guys on the next one

Channel: Chopsticks on the Loose

Views: 19,998

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Id: g6JZTc8vbtg

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 25 2022