Here are some of the things we had to do before we left in preparation! Thought it might be useful to some of you that are going travelling!
The one thing that probably consumed the most of our time was finding cheap flights! We spent hours searching for different airlines on so many different websites. We found out the price that we should be looking for and kept searching until we found something better. Many months were spent looking for our Iceland flight and one day we just luckily stumbled upon farestore.com that gave us the cheapest flight we had ever seen! The one main thing we wanted for this trip was to have no time constraints, so we only booked a flight to get to Europe and from there we will leave and go somewhere else when we are ready (or when our 90 days are up in the Schengen countries!) Here are some great sites to start the search: www.skyscanner.com (can show flight prices from one country to everywhere, shows monthly comparison etc.) www.bookingbuddy.com (compares different sites - e.g. Orbitz, Expedia, Kayak) www.edreams.ca www.vayama.com For more specific areas just ask us (There so many different sites specific to an area – a good site is http://www.euroflights.info/#destinations to find out which airlines flies into a specific city). Then it is a good idea to check the actual airlines websites and use other search engines. Travel insurance was another thing that took a long time to search for. We ended up going with Travel Underwriters, it had everything we wanted for a very reasonable price for a full year! Here are some of the sites: www.travelunderwriters.com www.worldnomads.ca One thing I (Ashleigh) thought would be easy to find are convertible pants (the ones that have the zipper, converting pants into shorts) but it took months to find women's pairs! But luckily one day, I found a good sale at Atmosphere and stocked up! Of course whenever you are really looking for something you can never find it! We searched for the right credit cards too. We knew most cards would have the 2.5% foreign exchange conversion fee but wanted ones that would benefit us with reward points! We both applied for an American Express and got a lot of bonus Aeroplan points just for applying! There are a lot of sites out there on this, if you need more info just ask! A good website for visas showing some visa free countries for Canadians traveling to other countries is http://embassy-finder.com/travel-with_canada_passport or check out the widget under our Tools section for visa requirements. Visa requirements change so it’s a good idea to check out other sites. Deciding where we are going to sleep is a lot of work too! Making sure hostels are available (and affordable). We will mostly do HI Hostels in Iceland, http://www.hostel.is since that’s pretty much all there is, the membership is around $20 a year and can be bought at any HI hostel! We also really want to try couch surfing somewhere, hopefully someone will host us! https://www.couchsurfing.org/n/dashboard Other great sites are: www.hostelworld.com www.hostelbookers.com https://www.airbnb.com (If you want to change it up and rent a place for a short time) A lot of things went in to making sure all the little things were addressed and we were getting the best deal! We are more than happy to share any information you want about what goes into the planning of this trip!
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