{"id":28545,"date":"2016-10-06T13:20:07","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T10:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/?p=28545"},"modified":"2016-10-06T13:20:07","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T10:20:07","slug":"narrowing-down-the-itinerary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/narrowing-down-the-itinerary\/","title":{"rendered":"Narrowing Down the Itinerary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My host in Spain got in touch with me last week to know if I&#8217;d bought my ticket for Spain yet. I was not anywhere near ready to lock that down. But as the month started to progress, I saw flight prices increase and knew I had to make a decision as to where I will be flying from, if only to give me a firm target to hit on my travels. I&#8217;m now in a part of Europe where travel isn&#8217;t that easy. There&#8217;s not much information online, bus schedules are really loose, and you have to really scale down your plans because you can&#8217;t get anywhere quickly.<\/p>\n<p>This morning, I decided to find the best deal on a ticket to Spain from a location that won&#8217;t cost me hundreds of dollars to get to from Sarajevo. I had originally thought I might fly from Athens, but from where I&#8217;m sitting this morning, that doesn&#8217;t make sense in terms of how much ground I&#8217;d have to cover and the cost to get there.<\/p>\n<p>I looked at Tirana, Albania, but research tells me that while Albania is lovely, it&#8217;s still the Wild West out there in terms of public transportation and internet (so basically the Canada of Europe?) and not ideal for my current type of travel.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m trying to make my next stop the Adriatic Coast in Montenegro (which is proving to be a job unto itself and will warrant another post), so I looked at flying out of Podgorica. Prices were terrible and Podgorica is universally regarded as one of the ugliest and least worth visiting capitals in Europe so I wasn&#8217;t that keen on spending time there.<\/p>\n<p>Next, I thought of going back to Belgrade, but was shocked by how high flights prices were and that most flights had me go through Istanbul!<\/p>\n<p>That left one other choice, which just happened to have a bargain flight to Barcelona on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/flying-wizz-air\/\">Wizz Air, which I know how to navigate<\/a>, on October 17th: Skopje, Macedonia.<\/p>\n<p>I had planned to fly into Spain around the 20th, so I&#8217;d have plenty of time to get to Almer\u00eda by the end of the day on the 24th. So the 17th is a bit early, but still well within my initial timeline. So I now have 11 days to get to Skopje Airport (I fly out late in the day, so I have most of the 17th if I need it) and from Barcelona will have a full week to get to Almer\u00eda. My 50USD\/70CAD flight is about\u00a0three times less than I had budgeted, so that will cover some exploration and the extra expense of being farther from Almer\u00eda than Madrid. I&#8217;m thinking a couple of days in Barcelona and then meandering my way down the coast&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>It feels good to have the flight booked. I&#8217;ve been feeling a little rudderless and now have a better idea of my budget and if I can afford the prices I&#8217;m seeing for accommodation on the Adriatic Coast. I know I will kick myself for skipping it, so I think I will go, but for only a few days and then spend the rest of my time in the Balkans in Macedonia. If the bus schedule I found is\u00a0correct, I may get to add Albanian and Kosovan stamps to my passport after all, even if I don&#8217;t spend any time in those countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My host in Spain got in touch with me last week to know if I&#8217;d bought my ticket for Spain yet. I was not anywhere near ready to lock that down. But as the month started to progress, I saw flight prices increase and knew I had to make a decision as to where I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1485,1589,1582,636,1587,1583,1588,1484,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-almeria","category-barcelona","category-bosnia-and-herzegovina","category-europe","category-macedonia","category-sarajevo","category-skopje","category-spain","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}