In 2012, Michael and I were talking about taking our first international trip together, which was very exciting and scary at the same time... It was our first vacation as a couple and you hear horror stories about new couples who end up in a break-up during their holidays. I was afraid of finding out that we had nothing to talk about, experiencing many awkward silences and having the same sad ending! But... Luckily none of this happened!
Prior to our trip we had plenty of planning to do and so many things to think about! First on our list was renewing our passports and requesting an international drivers license. As we only traveled in Europe during the previous 5 years, we only needed our Belgian documents for this, meaning, we really needed to have this done! After renewing or requesting all those documents, we pinned down the exact date of our departure, we chose 15/09/2013 as our D-day.
From that moment on the fun just had begun! We contemplated about which places we wanted to visit and on what we wanted to spend most of our budget. For the ones knowing us, know that we are not the kind of people who like spending a lot of money on accommodation, but prefer spending our hard-earned money on nice experiences, good transportation and of course good food... This last part is very important to anyone, but surely for my sweet Michael, cause he gets immensely grumpy when he has not eaten well!
At that point we had to start thinking about how long we could stay in the United States, knowing the list of places we liked to visit, things we wanted to see and budget we had at our disposal. We first researched the places on our list by following criteria: cost of hotels, things to do, travel time between A and B, whilst keeping in mind that this vacation had to be relaxing too. We really didn't want to return to Belgium feeling more wrecked than at the beginning of our trip!
We used a great website called Roadtrippers.com which gave us a good idea on the distances between the cities we had in mind, what hotels were in that area and what kind of restaurants they had in the neighborhood! Really handy tool, so check it out if you haven't yet done so! No sponsoring here, we just really loved it... After taking everything into consideration, we decided to travel for two weeks (15/09 - 29/09) to the following three main places we surely wanted to visit: Los Angeles, Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon.
With the exact period in mind and knowing where we wanted to go, we requested our days off at work and started searching the best deal for our plane tickets. We ended up finding a two-way ticket departing from Amsterdam to Los Angeles for 550 euros per person via Skyscanner.net, which was a really great deal! As we would land in Los Angeles in the afternoon, we also booked our first two nights in a hotel located in the airport area via Booking.com, the rest of our accommodations we wanted to book on the go. We also chose an SUV to drive those distances, which cost us around 600 euros for two weeks and I guess most of our pre-holiday budget went to the car rental, but we love us some comfort when on the road! Also did we like to visit Universal Studios when we returned to L.A., so we bought our admission tickets in advance which were around 85 euros per ticket at that time, now they cost more than 90 euros per ticket!
As we started preparations quite early, all main things were covered several months prior to departure. We only had to apply for our ESTA authorization (because Belgium is on the list of eligible countries for the Visa Waiver Program) which we requested two months in advance, we paid 14 dollars per person that's around 12,5 in euros and is valid for two years.
After all the hassle of planning, we could finally relax and look forward to our trip while eagerly counting down the days if not the hours!
This is the end of Part I, stay tuned for Part II where you will read about our first evening in Los Angeles! If you don't want to miss it, you could always subscribe to the blog...Thanksss and till next week!
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