Europe, Summer 2018

For Cruise Portion of Your Travel:
I like to take a lot of thin white coat hangers on cruises as you never get enough in your stateroom. I just leave them on the ship when we leave. I like to take some battery-powered stickon lights for the inside of closets, the inside of your room safe, and the inside of the bathroom (the light switch is on the outside so you awaken your spouse when you turn on the light at night). Take a small flashlight or head light for emergencies and for looking under the bed. I take at least a dozen plastic clothes pins and a good string for a clothes line (you usually have a clothes line in the shower already). The thin white coat hangers are useful for drying clothes also. You can not take a clothes iron on a cruise ship: they X-ray the luggage and it will be confiscated. Irons are available in the launderette. Take some stickers or pictures and double sided tape to decorate your cabin door. Stateroom cabin walls are metal covered with vinyl. Some really strong magnets are great for hanging papers, clothes to dry, daily activity schedules, and if strong enough for anchoring clothes lines. You always get a terri robe so you don't need to bring one. You will have a combination room safe. The cruise ship lends you a beach towel to take if you go to a beach. Take good sun screen and insect repellant and pack them in plastic boxes or Nalgene bottles so they don't leak in your luggage. Take extra glasses and sun glasses. A copy of your vision prescription has been a Godsend to travelers on several of our trips and could come in handy in some ports such as Hong Kong where glasses are inexpensive. There is a large lending library of books and DVD's on all cruise ships we use. I rip a lot of videos to my computer with Handbrake to view on my iPad or phone. You move videos on & off of your iPad through iTunes. In much of the developing world you bring your own toilet paper with you to public toilets so we carry a lot of small packs of tissues. On most cruise ship shore excursions you can leave your backpack on the bus when you get off to visit sites. Susan carries her own dual voltage curling iron. They have good hair dryers on cruise ships. You might swap photos with other travelers by using an SD card or usb stick so carry a few cheap ones. One of the most important things not to forget is to take some photocopies of your passport picture page. Because in most of the world you use the photocopy of your passport rather than the actual passport (which the ship holds for you); you may still need your driver's license or other government issued ID at some money exchanges etc or if you have marked your credit cards CID.

For the Train Travelling portion of your adventure:
You only want a carryon piece of luggage &/or backpack for this part of your trip. Store your cruise suitcase at Smartcart or Left Luggage counters at a major airport or train station you sill use so you can travel light. Download the app for the railroad system of the countries you will visit. Carry your raincoats. You may need cash on trains for food. Carry a pen with you to validate the day's portion of your railpass. We make sandwiches at the breakfast buffet to take on the trains to eat later. Be sure you know which cities have Uber or Lyft. If walking to hotels, be sure to have searched for your hotel when you had WiFi and leave the map app acitve on your phone so you can navigate when you get to your city. That map will stay on your phone and the gps will work without WiFi or cell data. Google maps on the iPhone actually allows you to download maps to your phone but you need good WiFi to do it.

For the Tour (Gate1) portion of your adventure: You can carry all of your luggage if you desire as it will be delivered to your room and just needs to be left outside your room at the designated time each morning.

Be sure and take some bandaids. Carry medication for a common cold, for gastroenteritis, for cuts & scrapes. Carry several types of antibiotics. I like to have some Augmentin, Cipro, cephazolin, and some doxycycline. Take some handkerchiefs. Know what your health insurance will cover over seas. Oceania and Holland America have excellent physicians onboard. Take some laxative as you will be less active on a cruise than at home. Sea sickness medication would be a good idea as would cough drops, ear drops, eye drops.

We carried two Nikon D5500 cameras and took Nikon raw photos. The 18-300 lens is good for standing at a distance and capturing shots of people without being so very obvious. We have given up using lens filters as Aperture can simulate any of them. I occasionally use a circular polarizer when at higher latitudes. When we take our cameras out of air conditioned rooms in plastic bags they don't fog up from the outside humidity as they adjust to the outside temperature. The iPhones don't seem to fog up like cameras with glass lenses do. The plastic bags come in handy if it rains. We import our pictures daily to Apple Aperture and quickly discard (reject) the out of focus or poorly-exposed ones. Then we next pick the best of any particular shot. Be sure all of your cameras are set to the exact same time to the second. Aperture handles the Nikon Raw files so much more seamlessly than the Photoshop or Lightroom we used to use. The most common adjustment we make in Aperture is white balance. Many light fixtures that in the past were incandescent now have the energy efficient fluorescent bulbs and need white balance changes made. When we went home for Lew's funeral we elected to leave our Nikon DSLR cameras at home and just use our iPhone 8 Plus's. We liked travelling light for our many train trips and do not feel ANY regret.

We have Verizon and have signed up for Travel Pass. If we take a phone off airplane mode and either initiate or receive a call or use cell data, we get 24hrs for about $10. We only used it three times on this trip. We got one SIMM cards for Germany (5 gig for 1wk for six euros) and one for Switzerland (Salt 5gig card for $8). Unfortunately you can't buy a prepaid panEuropean Union SIMM card unless you have a EU passport any more. We also got cards for Spain. Both phone service and WiFi are available onboard at a cost. The phone service acts as a roaming service. We use texts and I think Verizon's charge is 50 cents each to send and 5 cents to receive when out of the country but Verizon sends these by WiFi if you are connected and doesn't charge at all. We seldom use our phones but carry them with us off the ship for emergency calls. The cruise lines give you a local number to call their port agent in each port. We seldom turn on our cellular data for foreign roaming. Verizon's texts come through WiFi so logging on to WiFi often gets these texts. We vary as far as how we use the ships WiFi services. You can buy so many minutes through your computer or iPad. We got free internet on this cruise with Nautica as a promotion. On some cruises we make sure we visit coffee houses or McDonalds when we are in port. Cruise ship internet gets better every year. We had very good service on this cruise on Nautica until we got up above the arctic circle and there just aren't many communications satellites there.
On this trip we carried one MacBook Pro to process pictures in Aperture and code Susan's Story and the photo pages and Susan typed her story on an iPad. She didn't want the added weight of a computer in her backpack during the train travelling portion of our journey and is glad she made this choice. I use the iPad as a second monitor for coding HTML for the web pages using the free Duet app.
A real trick we learned is to get the locations of places you will need during the day when you have wifi in your hotel. Either download a map of the area or leave the map app active and that city map will stay on the phone and the gps on the phone can be used for navigating even when no cell data or wifi. If you forget to get a map up when you are connected, it is too late. Remember to mark the return location you need to get back to.

We take only appliances that will run on either voltage and since we are from the US we use small plastic adapters that turn the 220v plugs to 110v. I carry a couple splitter cubes. We have seen people have power strips confiscated on cruise ships so don't take them. Some plugs only work when the stateroom lights are on or a room key card is in a slot in the room. The Nautica and Holland America ships have a shaver 110/220v plug in the bathroom. You don't need to take a voltage converter as long as your appliances are able to use 220v. Be sure and bring battery chargers for any appliance that needs one. Most modern chargers will run on both 110v & 220v but check before you come. There are hair dryers in Holland America and Oceania ships. On the Nautica we had a built in one in the bathroom and a good hand held portable 220v one for use out in the cabin. There is a wake up function for the phone so you don't need an alarm clock. We had a British adapter for Ireland.

We have special travel socks and underwear such as those by Exofficio or Magellan that we can wash out daily and need very few pairs. These usually dry within a half day if washed in the room, thoroughly rung out, rolled up inside of towels, and hung up to dry in the stateroom. These dry more quickly inside than outside on the veranda. We also have travel shirts and pants (long & short versions of each) that dry this quickly when hand washed in the room. We used shampoo on the clothes and generally washed clothes each night and stayed clean. There are usually laundromat services on cruise ships but be advised that these are closed if there is an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness on the ship. We washed clothes this adventure when we got home for Lew's funeral, the very moment we got on Nautica, and the last day of the cruise. Cruise ships offer laundry services at a charge. We have culled the clothes we take over the years to be those with the most wrinkle resistance and to dry the quickest. In many parts of the world, we really appreciate the secure zipping pockets of our travel clothes (safari type clothing). Don't forget your hat for sun protection.
The more years we travel the more we find we can take less and less clothes with us on our trips. Oceania has no formal nights but I find my blue Travelsmith blazer appreciated at times. Holland America has one formal night a week but a suit is fine as very few formal clothes are seen on those nights. Some cruise ships are cold so be warned. Even if you don't plan to swim, take a bathing suit as the hot tubs and saunas are wonderful and you might need to work on your tan. Don't forget exercise clothes for the gyms onboard and in hotels.

We like suitcases that will compress enough to keep under the cruise ship bed so they don't take up room in the stateroom. We often carry a thin gym bag in case we buy items that will require another suitcase on the way home but didn't take one this time. On every cruise we take there are passengers whose luggage did not arrive on the airline and they are stuck without their luggage. We put a couple changes of clothing in our carryon luggage and we almost always go a day or two early so any tardy luggage has a chance to catch up with us. We had to do without our luggage in Hamburg as LOT was a day late getting our luggage there. On the flight to catch our cruise I label each luggage item with our final destination for the flight (hotel name) because luggage could get mixed up on the shuttle from the airport (this has happened). I use Nalgene water bottles and plastic waterproof boxes to pack my fragile or liquid items so things can't spill in the suitcase.
What made this adventure especially doable is that we left our cruise suitcase in Zurich & Madrid for some weeks at either Smartcart or LeftLuggage in the airport/train station so we didn't have to carry it daily onto trains.

We have found that having a couple hundred dollars each in one and 5 dollar bills (or euros in parts of the world) opens up so many possibilities to get us good service, pay porters, and buy trinkets. We find out immediately upon entering a country how to tip and who. The US dollar is still king. We split up our credit and debit cards so if we are robbed we can continue our trips. One of the most important thing not to forget is to take some photo copies of your passport picture page. Because you use the photocopy of your passport rather than the actual passport (which the ship holds for you or you have it hidden) you may still need your driver's license or other government issued ID at some money exchanges etc or if you have marked your credit cards CID. I have records of credit card numbers and the international phone number for the card. We know which ones have foreign transaction fees. Before we leave on our trip we call the credit card company (or do this online) and let them know which days we will be in each country so they will allow the transactions. We still have cards frozen by the banks when we withdraw large amounts out of the country or make large purchases and we just have to deal with this by going to the bank's app on your phone. This problem is easy to resolve by logging in to the card's web page and checking messages. Be advised that the first time you log in to your bank's app out of the country you will have to verify yourself and may well have to get a text on your USA cell phone number. Keep up with your plane tickets and any vouchers you carry with you and make a picture of all of them on your cell phone as well as passports, Global Entry, drivers licenses, insurance cards, car insurance, international drivers permit, tour vouchers, etc. In Europe and Japan in particular be sure your credit cards have been upgraded to Smart Cards that carry the computer chip. We used Euro's a lot on our trip. We did need Polish and Belarussan currancy in small amounts (less than $20 total each country for bathrooms etc and we used Swiss Francs a lot. We needed no local currancy for the UK, Norway, or Russia. We use our last of a currency for tips at our last meal in the country or for guides. Otherwise we ALWAYS TIP IN US DOLLARS as this is how we show that Americans are the most generous tippers and deserve to be treated the best.

One thing that I have found saves hassels is the first day or two you are out of the country, use ALL of your credit cards, log in to ALL of your bank's apps on your phones and computers and if necessary verify the text message they send as security on your cell phone before you change SIMM cards and don't have that phone number any more. You won't be asked but once so get it over with. It also seems that if you log in to your credit card apps frequently and check your purchases, you must get some credit to not make these purchases suspicious to the bank.

Know which of your cards have foreign transaction fees and which don't. My home bank has a fee for all foreign transactions but it is just $7.50 and the only reason we use it is to get cash at ATM's as the "cash withdrawal fees" of my cards that don't have foreign transaction fees is very much higher than $7.50. If you are going to need a lot of cash of one type of another (Euros for example), order it from your bank at home in advance to get the best exchange rate. The next best is to exchange NEW CRISP American $20 dollar bills for the foreign currency. DON'T expect anyone to take $50 or $100 bills (they don't like to take them in the US either!). You will find that old bills are not taken in exchange.

Taxi's in Belarus, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, and Spain accepted credit cards. Train transportation was wonderful and surprisingly easy to navigate. We got passes online before coming to Europe. The Swiss train tickets and even hotels were part of a Golden Pass promotion they were having. The trains in Germany luckily had good wifi but I don't remember ANY wifi on the Swiss or Spanish trains. We got a 72hr transportation pass in Dublin at the airport and used it to get to city center near the Hilton where we stayed. We bought our train tickets from Barcelona to Madrid online before coming to Europe.

We love our travel agent Dianne Blackburn at Gateway Travel in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She usually follows our progress when we fly and has even called ahead and rebooked flights when she knows we won't make connections. We call her from all over the world. We have used her for over 20 years and feel she consistently gets us the best deals. Susan takes whatever deals she can find to her and Dianne tries to get a better deal. Even when we book a cruise etc we make sure Dianne gets credit with the Cruise Line.