The agent and reservations

Starting in Feb 08 we took all the references from our dear friends Vaidehi and Kedar who had been there and done it in 2007. Contacted the travel agent in Mumbai: Rhoda Langarna and made reservations for the to and fro flights.

Since we bought the flight tickets in April for travel in Sept we got them relatively cheap $850 each as we found out later.

Everything except for the round trip flights was taken care of by our agent Rhoda. She is a very nice lady works from her office in Mumbai. We felt she was highly approachable and provided us with lot of information including a detail itinerary which we referred to everyday when we traveled. I would strongly recommend her for planning a future trip.

Rhoda was responsible to make following reservations for us:
Hotels near the train stations in both Italy and France.
Lido show and Illuminations tour in Paris.
Guided tour for Ruins in Pompey City, Naples.
Euro rail pass for 6 unique days.

We ended up making following on our own:
A brief stop at London:
(Oyster pass) Train tickets from Gatwick airport -> London bridge
Gatwick express tickets from Birmingham palace -> airport

Italy:
Venice -> Vaporreto 1 day pass for both
Florence -> Tickets for Museums at Academia, Ufizi
Pisa -> Train tickets from Florence -> Pisa
Capri Island Hydrofoils (2 ways for each) -> Napoli coast to Capri Island and back
Rome -> Vatican city + Sistine Chapel guided tour (audio guides)
-> Colloseum + Palantine hill guided tour
-> 3 day subway metro pass (11 euros each)

France:
Nice -> Monte Carlo and Cannes (Train tickets)
Nice -> Eze village bus transport
Paris -> Museum pass for 2 days (26 euros each)

+ food and wines and gelatos from time and again every day !

Getting Visa

As per the laws for getting Schengen visa in 2008, the country where you will be spending most of your time is where you would seek to get the visa from.
In our case we were going to spend about 8 days in Italy and rest of 6 in France; so we had to go to Italian Consulate in SFO to get the visa for both of us.

At the consulate:
Each consulte should have a website detailing what documents you absolutely need to have. Among some of the most important ones are:
Proof that you have medical insurance to cover you abroad. In our case we asked our insurance company to send us a fax to say so in writing. That was sufficient.
Also Italian consulate was pretty strict about all the trip vouchers and receipts for the bookings. This includes hotels, Euro Rail, Flight Tickets etc. They want to make sure that you know where each night you will be staying. So make sure you have that info.

Roman Holiday I: A European affair

I and Rohit got married on Dec 25th 05 and went for our honeymoon to Hawaii (Norwegian Cruise Liners) on a cruise ! It felt so great ! But somehow after 3 years in 2008 we felt the urge to go somewhere far off and just be with each other and have a time of our lives !

We considered a lot of options between Peru/South America/Alaska/Europe/Egypt/Australia and so on.... Finally Rohit asked me where I would love to go and I said Europe ! So Europe it was !

First Entry Ever

Hello World !

Being a computer programmer I cannot help it but to write my very first "Hello World" greeting when I start this blog ! So here it goes ...