Eurotrip 2004

Booked a flight today to London on Airmiles.

My best friend, Lucy, is getting married on May 1 in Wolverhampton, near Birmingham in the West Midlands. What I need to do upon arrival in London is make my way north, get my bridesmaid dress fitted first (I'd better start hitting the gym asap), then head off to Barcelona and meander down the Spanish coast. Haven't decided yet how far to go -- Alicante? Malaga? I think Faro (Portugal) would really be pushing it... I have to be back in plenty of time for the wedding. John's big family from Northern Ireland fly in on Friday the 30th , so I'd like to pre-empt the mayhem.


After the wedding the plan is France for about 5 days, maybe a couple of days in Paris, then take the TGV to visit my friend Nolwenn and her husband Gilles and their new baby Chanelle near Vannes in Britanny, then fly back to London from either Brest or Dinard. Brittany looks beautiful and Brest and Dinard are both coastal towns. Coastal Spain then Coastal France sounds good to me, especially with a big English-Irish wedding in between!


So here's what it looks like thus far:

Apr 18 - Vancouver -> London
Apr 19 - London -> Wolverhampton
Apr 21 - Birmingham -> Barcelona
Apr 21-28 (Barcelona, then to Malaga? Alicante? Murcia?) Spain
Apr 28/29 - Spain -> Birmingham

*wedding Saturday, May 1*

May 2 - Liverpool -> Paris
May 5??? Paris -> TGV -> Vannes??
May 6??? Vannes -> Brest? Dinard?
May 7 - Dinard? Brest? -> London
May 8 - London -> Vancouver

I tried SO many different options I was beginning to despair:

- open-jaw Vancouver-Barcelona-Birmingham
- open-jaw Vancouver-Birmingham-Barcelona
- Vancouver-Birmingham
- Vancouver-Toronto-London-Cardiff! (it was as close as I could get to Wolverhampton!)
- Vancouver-Ottawa-London...
- crazy routings with American airlines such as NorthWest that forced me to go through San Francisco and New York before even leaving the continent!

It was pretty crazy. What it comes down to is that the airlines that are available through Airmiles out of Vancouver are showing almost no regional flights, mostly hub cities like Amsterdam (on KLM) and London (on Air Canada) so it's not so bad getting to London, it's how to get to Wolverhampton. The outbound flight was particularly nutty, as I could not get a single non-stop flight on any of the airlines to depart on April 17, I was getting sent all over the map. The best I could do, because I have an exam on Friday from 7:00-10:00 in the evening, is to leave on a red-eye flight from Vancouver to Toronto, then connect to London. This isn't so bad, because I leave at nearly midnight on April 17, and get some sleep time before Toronto, to make the connection to London and get in after 9pm. I don't really lose that much time, with the connection, only a few hours total. I'm just happy I was able to get the last seat on a non-stop London-Vancouver flight.