Booking the Trip!

A room with a view!

Camino Ingles? Camino Frances in 100 to 200k increments? Camino Portugues - the full route? Last 100k of the Camino Frances?

These are the options I'm tossing about at the moment. I will do a Camino this coming May, I just am not sure which one. The Camino Ingles looks very attractive to me right now. The entire route is just over 100k, enough for the Compostella and completely doable with the vacation time I have available to me. I would like to fly into London, spend two days there then take a ferry over to the start point in Ferrol (sp?). This would be a very authentic way to do it. But, to do it alone would be a real challenge. The route still has not really caught on and from what I've read, maybe one pilgrim a day comes through. There doesn't seem to be a lot of pilgrim infrastructure so with few refugios, hotels would have to be found along the way. And I would be very alone which has as many positives as it does negatives.

I've just this week started studying the various routes. I have some time before I need to make a decision. Then on to the logistics. What city/country to fly into? Train connections. Hotels. Buses. It was so much easier last year when Karin did all the leg work! But then, you get from an effort what you put into that effort and that's another lesson I've learned from the Camino.

Despite my initial disappointment at our decision to do the Portuguese Camino rather than a part of the French route, I soon got completely psyched. The Portuguese route is the second most popular Camino and very pilgrim friendly.

By January, out plans were pretty firm. We would leave the Thursday before Memorial Day and fly back June 1, the day before my birthday! It was time to book the tickets!

I have an excellent travel agent, her name is Karen and she works at Liberty Travel in Cherry Hill. I urged my Camino companions to use her for our travel arrangements. I told them how she really went over and above for me in 2007 when my son and I were going to Munich over his spring break. He was supposed to fly home from South Carolina that Friday then Saturday, we would take our evening flight from Philadelphia to Munich. Except one small glitch, the St. Patrick's Day ice storm that shut down the entire east coast! My travel agent worked long and hard in that ice storm to get my son on a flight the following day which was no easy task. Getting him to Philadelphia turned out to be a real nail biter but that's another blog for another day!

My Camino companion Karin books travel as part of her job but agreed to use my travel agent. So on a cold Sunday afternoon in early February, we all met at Liberty Travel to book the trip. Getting our tickets meant we really were going on Camino. With tickets in hand, we couldn't change our minds!

When we arrived at the travel agency, it started to snow, rather heavy too. I took it as a good omen because the same thing happened when I first met with Karen to book my Munich trip.

It took no time at all to book the flights. Philly to Lisbon and for the return, Santiago to Madrid then Madrid to Philadelphia. We began to look at hotels as well but Karin wanted to hold off. I was kind of disappointed but I figured she wanted to search on line for a better deal. But, WE HAD OUR TICKETS! Our Camino was going to happen!

Afterwards, we all headed to Five Guys Burgers and Fries to celebrate. I remember we got burgers with jalepenos. They were fresh jalepenos, not jarred and were really very hot! I like Five Guys, they give you free peanuts and I'm a total nut junkie.

Camino Karin did find and book our rooms on line. We needed a hotel for one night in Porto and then two nights in Santiago. Joe was pushing to stay at least one night in one of the refugios in Santiago but good sense prevailed! Though I had some reservations about the hotels selected, at that point, I was just happy to have a room in which to sleep. It seemed the hotels weren't that much of a bargain though. I had a feeling we would have done better had we used the travel agent.

For my Munich trip, my travel agent put us up at the K&K Harras. It was in a very nice residential neighborhood, not in the heart of the Marienplatz tourist district. But, the U-Bahn was right across the street and put me in the city center in less than 15 minutes. Everything about the hotel was wonderful. There was a great free breakfast buffet and it had the best, most fluffy bed I every slept in. Best of all, it cost $2,000 less than a hotel in the city center. Travel agent expertise at it's finest. Had I tried to find a lower cost hotel on my own, who knows where I would have ended up.

I'll give an example using a city I know well, Philadelphia. And pretend I'm a tourist from anyplace in Europe who wants to book their own trip to see the city that was the cradle of American liberty. So in checking things out on line, I see the downtown hotels are pretty expensive. But for a whole lot less money, I can stay in a hotel by Temple University which has public transportation nearby. Great, I can take the bus and be at the Liberty Bell in ten minutes. It's right near a university so it must be a nice area. Who needs a travel agent? For anyone who booked that trip all I can say is, may God have mercy on their soul!!!

Both of our self-booked hotels were fine really, just way off the track from where I was hoping we would be. In retrospect, after Karin found the hotels online, I should have gone back to my travel agent to see what she could find. 20-20 hindsight!

Our self booked hotels weren't all that bad, the TC Santiago was actually a never nice hotel but I'll talk more about them when I get to actually talking about the Camino.