Skip to main content

Eurotrip 2015 | Prelude

NZ2 - on my way to London


Woohoo! after six months of planning I'm finally off on my first trip to europe. I left for the airport at around 3pm on Friday to catch my Air New Zealand Flight to London (NZ2). Taking the airport bus from the city was an easy experience and no pre-booking was required.

I reached the airport with plenty of time to spare... and before I knew it my plane was in the air and on it's way to London. Apart from some turbulence early on in the flight (which disrupted the meal service), the flight went well and I ended up reaching London slightly earlier than scheduled.

Itinerary

My itinerary for this trip was scheduled to include:

  • London (2 days)
  • Paris (3 days)
  • Gimmelwald - Bernese Oberland (3 days)
  • Rome (3 days)
  • Venice (2 days)
  • Munich (2 days)
  • Bacharach (2 days)
  • Amsterdam (3 7 days)
Unfortunately during the trip, I had to cancel my journey to Germany due to the migrant crisis in Munich causing train cancellations between Venice and Munich. The repercussions of the last minute cancellation of my night train from Venice to Munich caused significant expenses that ate into my emergency travel funds and no longer made Germany possible.

Travel style

With this being my first trip to Europe, as well as my first solo travel experience, I wanted to keep the costs at a more manageable level without necessarily sacrificing on experiences that would go on to define the trip. This meant:
  • Booking intercity point to point train journeys in advance
  • Booking accommodations in advance - well rated hostels and bed & breakfasts
  • Eating frugally whilst still experiencing local cuisine - mostly street foods and cafes frequented by locals, with the occasional splurge in restaurants
  • Carrying just one carry-on sized backpack in case I need to fly in a budget airline
Savings made from the approach above would allow me to spare no expense in experiencing the best of what a city had to offer, including investing in passes that would allow me to skip lines in sights. 

For the next few blog posts, I will be publishing a series of travel journals to share my personal experience on this 3 week trip. 

Check out the rest of my Eurotrip 2015 trip journals below:
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Only show a control to an employee's manager in PowerApps (using SharePoint as a data source)

The Problem In my previous blog post , I wrote a basic tutorial on configuring PowerApps to conditionally show/hide and make mandatory/optional a control based on the answer provided in a previous control. In this blog post we will expand on that scenario to create a form that only shows a control called approval status to a user if that logged in user is the manager of the user specified in the employee control. This means when the manager is using the application, they can change the status to approved. Meanwhile, a user that is not a manager of the person specified in the employee cannot change the status to approved. The Solution Aside from containing a variety of native functions, PowerApps also allow us to add connections to add functionalities into our app. In this case we will add the Office 365 Users connection so that we can get information on: The user that is logged on The manager of the user specified in the employee control Note: Whilst this soluti
Read more

An intro to conditional validation and formatting in PowerApps (using SharePoint as a data source)

The Problem What if we need to create a form that changes it's behaviour based on the answer entered by the user. For example, we need to build a leave request form that: Shows the comment field if applying for a sick leave, but hides the comment field if applying for a annual leave Requires the requestor to write a comment if their sick leave is more than 1 day, but is optional if sick for just 1 day.  The default form interface for custom lists in SharePoint Online can be used for basic scenarios, but doesn't provide an easy way to add business logic described above ( unless you want to write some javascript ) In the past InfoPath would have been the tool of choice for many, however this tool is now in maintenance mode and whilst it will still be supported for a wee while  there will be no improvements or enhancements to the platform. The Solution This is where PowerApps come in. PowerApps is now the platform that is recommended by Microsoft as a way fo
Read more

SharePoint | Set default value of date field to last day of the month

One of the things, that I needed to do recently is find a way to set the default value of a date field to the last day of the month. Though some content were really helpful in getting me on the way to solving the problem, I thought I'd post the formula required to make it easier for others looking to do the same in the future. What I wanted to do  The steps below describe what I wanted to achieve: User uploads a file into a document library A date column will automatically be populated with the date representing the end of the month (calculated based on the date the file was uploaded) How do we do this? Open your column settings for your date field Under the Additional Column Settings, set the default value option to Calculated Value Enter the the formula below: =(DATE(YEAR(TODAY()),MONTH(TODAY())+1,DAY("1-Apr-2008"))) - (1) Click save and that's all you need to do What does the formula above do? The formula above is quite simple.
Read more