Europe? Stay in youth hostels and use trains for the backbone of your travel. That’s what I did (except for the ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm). If you get a Eurail pass, it will give you discounts on things like ferry fares and the Channel Tunnel train. (You need to get a BritRail pass for the UK, once you step off the Channel Tunnel train.) I also have a lifetime membership in Hostelling International, so that gets me inexpensive accommodation anywhere I go.
I spent three weeks in Europe: fly into Helsinki for a conference, spend a week there, spend a week travelling to London, spend a week in London and meet relatives, fly home from there.
Finland was beautiful. The landscape reminded me of the Shield country of central Canada, which was a great surprise to me, because I had thought that the Shield country was unique in the world. So there was this underlying geographic sense of familiarity… but it was totally different. The roads were different, the buildings were different, the language was different, the trams were different, the phones were different, the cars were different… I don’t think I ever fully understood the street-numbering system, for example.
The granite hill that might have held a nineteenth-century house in Canada held a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Helsinki. Helsinki did not have the overwhelmingly-large freeways that central Canada does; everything was constructed on a smaller scale. The highways had bus stops and paralleling bikeways. In some ways, it seemed an alternate-universe version of Canada run by smarter people.
Then travelling across northern Europe. I took a ship, an overnight ferry, to Stockholm and then trains to Copenhagen, Hannover, Paris, and London.
I stayed in a hostel built into a ship in Stockholm. I stayed in an apartment in Copenhagen, for free (found via the Pasporta Servo hospitality exchange).
And I made the pilgrimage to Legoland. The Original.
To get to Legoland from Copenhagen, I took a local bus ride to to the train station, then 1.5 hours on the train to the town of Vejle, then another half-hour bus ride to the park. This was almost exactly the same duration and type of journey I was used to for travelling across the Greater Toronto Area from Oakville to Oshawa to visit my father: bus ride, 1.5-h train ride, bus ride. The train in Denmark was faster, to be true, and it crossed some major bridges and passed through a major tunnel. But to me, the trip was an extended local trip in a large metropolitan area: something you could do (and I did) in a long day trip.
But when I described it to my Pasporta Servo host, his jaw dropped, and he said, “You went halfway across the country?!!” I looked at a map. It was, indeed, halfway across the country.
After I left Copenhagen, it was overnight train to Frankfurt-am-Main (conveniently eliminating additional hotel bills), and another train to Hannover, where I took in Expo 2000. Then another overnight train to Paris.
Paris was grittier than I expected. But so worth it. I only overnighted there, and didn’t even get to go up the Eiffel Tower (lineups too long). I caught the Channel Tunnel train to London the next day. I want to go back to Paris and explore the art.
After I got to London, I connected with distant cousins and we explored the city, finding places where my grandparents had lived. It’s different going to a place if you speak the language and have family connections, then going in as a total tourist, but it was equally good.
. I’m mostly looking for scenic nature and medieval (or older) historical structures and artifacts, while the girlfriend is into nature and city architecture. One of the most pressing concerns is diet; I’m a vegetarian and she is a vegan. This may restrict our possibilities; for instance, I would like to see my birth city in Ukraine, but if the attitudes of my family and “Everything is Illuminated” are anything to go by, we may have a tough time there.