For those of you who do travel, you will know that booking anything for a trip cannot be done until approximately a year before hand, so in the meantime we looked at tours, places we wanted to go and had a wish list of what this trip would entail.
As our return date is around the 20th of September, we had to wait until that date in 2024 to start booking our first important item – our flights! That happened in October 2024 and we decided to spend a little more and book Premium Economy.
Costs:
For your interest, Economy was around $2100 return for each of us and Premium Economy around $4400 return for each of us. t should be noted here that when I first looked at the costs on the 21st September 2024 – Premium would have cost $4100 return each, so in the few weeks it took us to book them the cost had already gone up. Now when I look up the same flights – the cost is between $6200 and $6800 return each – so this proves that it pays to book as early as you can!
Tip – book your flights early! Don’t wait to see if you can get last minute deals – its not worth the hassle and stress and you likely might get a deal on the current prices, but it still won’t likely beat the price you pay if you book really early.
After booking the flights, I started to look further into where we wanted to go, looking at tours that we had found. Tours are always something you look at as it is hassle free, its all planned for you and you know what to expect. But after a lot of investigation, nothing really fit quite right, whether it was the starting and ending times, where they were going etc. And the cost of the tours were in the $10K area (or more) and we wanted to do at least two or three of these to cover England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.
After being a little disappointed as the prices and time of the tours, I decided to see what the cost would be to do the “tours” ourselves – taking points of interest from the various tours, taking into account where we wanted to go with regards to family heritage and meeting family etc – and there became born the Draft UK Itinerary – a relatively small spreadsheet (at the start anyway) that detailed where we would start, a potential route throughout the whole of the UK and then where we would finish up. This started the plan of us hiring a car and taking on the UK ourselves – two Kiwi gals, without their partners, driving the length of the UK together over a 6 week period!
Fitting it all into our timeframes proved interesting (and to be fair 6 weeks was still a tight squeeze!) – but it allowed us to do what we wanted, when we wanted and we could also add on a little stop to Paris so we could visit the British War Memorial in Ver Sur Mer (a photo of the memorial from the internet is below) and our Grandfathers grave from the war in Bayeax, France (a photo of the memorial from the internet is below)
British War Memorial – Normandy
War Memorial – Bayeax
I wish I could say the planning was as simple as putting it all down in a spreadsheet – but alas that was just the very small start of what was to become a very detailed spreadsheet!
Over the course of this blog, I will show you what I did, what I learnt and how we are tracking. Later when our departure date has arrived, I will give you details of our trips, things we have learnt along the way, the goods things that happened and the not so good things that happened and also probably lost of photographs.
So stay tuned for the next installment to come.