Taking Off #8: Status, January 2020

[Image: “Europa, 1538 / Pomponio Mela”; found it via the Flickr account of the National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de España), and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!) There’s probably much I could say about the map, but for now just leave it at this: I love that it’s pretty much devoid of identifiable destinations; that seems uncannily apropos.]

Our plans for the EuroTour 2020 adventure aren’t stalled, but we can fairly claim to have been a bit… preoccupied in recent months. We had a long visit with The Stepson over the Christmas holiday; and we — by which I mean mostly The Missus — have been involved in plans for The Stepdaughter’s wedding (coming just a couple weeks before our planned departure for England); and we’re both in the last three months of pre-retirement from jobs of long standing…

So, like I said: preoccupied.

Here are a few things we’ve done regarding the Europe trip.

Technology

After much neurotic back-and-forth, researching and re-researching, so on and so forth, I have set up a new account with a new cellular provider: Google Fi.

Fi is one carrier most often mentioned as optimized for international travel, for these reasons among others:

• Unlimited WiFi tethering for devices which lack cellular data capability. (Basically, you use your phone — which does have cellular data capability — to act as a WiFi hotspot for these other devices… like my own tablet/notebook.)
• WiFi calling (vs. cellular plan calling) by default.
• Always-on VPN automatically in place whenever you’re using an open WiFi network.
• Fi doesn’t offer cellular service itself; instead, it works with other carriers to ride on their networks. By default, the carrier used is T-Mobile. With certain “made for Fi” phones, however, Fi automatically switches among three different carriers’ networks: T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular. Whichever carrier’s network is strongest there, that’s the carrier the phone will use for cellular service. (This may be of limited use when overseas, I’m not sure.)
• Some of Google’s own phones work with “e-SIMs” as well as physical ones. A SIM is the little widget — usually a little chip physically installed in the phone — which allows the phone to be used with a given carrier’s network. If you have an unlocked phone, you can just pop out one SIM and pop in another to use a different network. An e-SIM, on the other hand, is just a software widget downloaded from the carrier’s site and stored on the phone. The “dual SIM” setup which these Google phones permit lets you rely mostly on Google Fi’s own e-SIM… and add a second, physical SIM from a carrier other than the three from among which Fi makes its automatic selection. When overseas, then, you buy and install a physical SIM for an overseas carrier. At that point you can use the overseas SIM (for which cellular calling is generally cheaper than for US carriers, and which may provide better coverage as well) for overseas calls, and never have to ride on T-Mobile etc.

To take advantage of as many of these features as possible, I’ve got a new Google Pixel 3a phone, with the Google Fi e-SIM. I’m looking forward to using it “over there”!

Aside: it doesn’t hurt that the Pixel 3a also has a very highly rated smartphone camera.

Travel logistics

What this boils down to, so far, is a single word: packing.

When we went to England for a week in 2018, we each took one large rolling suitcase (which we checked), one small (carry-on size) rolling suitcase, and one “personal item” — a purse or smallish cross-body pack.

While this gear allowed us to be very comfortable once we were situated somewhere, it made getting from one location to another very tricky — especially for two folks of the not-a-spring-chicken persuasion. (Boarding the Tube in London with it all, during rush hour, simply to get to a regular railway station — well, that was maybe the single worst part of the trip for me.)

This time around, we will be smarter. To that end, we — well, primarily (but not exclusively) I — used our 10-day trip to The Stepson’s neighborhood as a sort of trial run. Here was my packing-related routine, this time around:

• Based on things I’d seen, asked, and had answered in numerous online sources, I decided I’d limit myself to one (checked, but carry-on size) small rolling bag; one (carry-on size) backpack; and one “personal item.”
• The backpack I chose is made by a company called Osprey; they’ve been in business since the 1970s, and offer a lifetime warranty on their products. The specific model is called the Farpoint 40, where “40” refers to its nominal 40-liter capacity. I don’t have a photo of myself wearing it, but here’s a photo grabbed from the Web, of a guy about my build wearing his:
  

  

• The “personal item” was a very basic laptop case for my Pixelbook laptop/tablet. As a rule, I meant to leave it in the laptop compartment of the backpack — except when seated and in flight. In practice, though, I carried it around a lot when in one terminal or another, wedging it under an arm or just clutched in a hand. This got very tedious, primarily because the laptop case does not have a shoulder or cross-body strap — or even a handle — on it. So that’s one important lesson: I need an easier-to-carry laptop case.
• Important lesson #2, and this probably falls into the “Duh” category of important lessons: get used to wearing the backpack on my back. I’d bought the pack from a local retailer, expressly so they could help me prep the various straps for my body size and shape; in the store, though, it was filled only with plastic bubble-wrap. When I had it packed with 40 liters of “stuff,” including various electronic gear, toiletries, and so on, I thought, like, whoa… and opted to carry it around in terminals via the handles at the top and side of the pack. It was in fact still too heavy to carry that way for an extended period of time. Putting these two things together, then, I need to (a) more intelligently allocate lighter-weight stuff to the backpack and, indeed, (b) carry it on my back.
• Within the backpack, I’d packed a smallish, very lightweight “daypack” with the intention of using it while walking around town — transporting camera lenses, say, and spare camera batteries, and my Kindle. In the event, I had no opportunity to use the daypack, so I can’t report further about it yet. I’m going to try it out around town here, and on a couple of long-weekend trips we’ll be making in the next couple of months, to get used to it (and, perhaps, add another important lesson or two!).
• I found an excellent video demonstrating how to fold a sportcoat without completely wrecking it with wrinkles, pleats, and so on (needless to add, maybe, I did use this technique in packing my own blazer for the trip):

• On previous trips, I’d already confirmed the efficacy of the “roll, don’t fold” method of packing — as well as the use of “packing cubes” for efficient un- and re-packing. This time around, I added another ingredient: “compression sacs.” These zip-loc-style bags worked well for the items — shirts and better-than-jeans pants especially — which I didn’t want to roll.
• I’d also read quite a bit about replacing standard bathing toiletries — shampoo, optionally conditioner, and liquid face- and body-wash soaps — with one-item-fits-all-purposes bar soaps. I bought a couple brands of these. While they take some getting used to (they don’t seem to lather very much, for example), they are indeed much more convenient than — and seem to work just as well as — the various separate products I’ve been using for years.

Itinerary

Ah, yes: maybe the most important item, right?

Alas, “most important” doesn’t translate as “first done”! Thanks to The Missus’s and my separate preoccupations, we simply haven’t taken the time to nail this down any more firmly. I’m hopeful that this weekend will break the logjam.

All of which said, I’ve been thinking about the itinerary quite a bit. Folded into this thinking are several time-specific considerations:

• We are really, really hoping to spend our 20th anniversary (at the end of May) in London.
• We want to see at least some of the UK before heading over to the Continent proper.
• We want to be back in the UK in August, to take advantage of some events occurring only during that month.
• As previously laid out, we’ve got the whole Schengen-visa limitations to deal with: a maximum of 90 days, within a 180-day window.
• For travel in the UK, we have another 180-day window: tourists from the USA to the UK may travel visa-free for only 180 days at a time. (I’m not sure of the nuances of this yet.)
• Google Fi is well aware of the temptation for overseas travelers to, well, “accidentally” take advantage of its data features, indefinitely. For this reason, they state pretty explicitly that as these features are intended primarily for (and indeed, officially cleared for) domestic use within the USA. If the service is not used domestically within 6 months, it will be suspended. (This applies to data usage; the number itself won’t be removed from the network, and phone calls can still be made.) This problem can probably be avoided by temporarily suspending the Google Fi service, which can can be done at any time, and using one of those international SIMs I mentioned in the interim.

Anyway, the main idea is that we need to hop back and forth between the UK (and other non-Schengen countries) and the Schengen area over the course of the trip. This might yield a schedule looking about like the following, for the whole seven to eight months of the trip’s duration:

…which to me looks a little, well, nuts. Confusing, anyhow — especially relative to the nice orderly schedule which I’ve been showing off to everyone so far… or for that matter, the ostensibly Schengen-ized version of it.

Well, as the saying goes: anything worth doing is almost never easy to do!