Oh the Shame!!!! (Maybe)

Oh the woahs of being a 22-year-old, preparing to depart for a trip around the world. It seems that once again our eyes were bigger than our wallets. (A common symptom I have). Naturally when you plan to span the globe for a modest $15,000 USD, you have to sacrifice a few things on your trip. For shame - no daily spa treatments, or dining on fine caviar for us. But now our plans to go to the World Cup are in jeopardy.

As you may or may not know, the World Cup will take place this summer in Germany, roughly around the time we will be in Spain. And in our very-American way of thinking, we thought, "Hey Germany-Spain, they're pretty close, that'll be like making a Thursday night beer-run to Missouri." Truth be told, it's a little more costly than that. Most of the matches (at least USA's matches) take place in smaller German towns, which don't have a lot of hotels/hostels (at least not available on-line). To aggravate the situation further, most of the cheaper airlines (RyanAir, Germanwings, Air Berlin) offer, at best 100 euro roundtrip flights, and most of those fly into cities which are at best 100 km from where we will be staying/departing from. Combining all the expenses to travel to the airport to take the expensive flight, just to take another bus/train to the city where the match is, to check into your over-booked, expensive hotel to watch your +$50 match, to go back home and pay all those same travel expenses again would easily cost each of us 300 euros.

So for obvious reasons, flying to the World Cup is out. But there another option. The two best words in the English language for 5 boys to hear. "ROAD TRIP." This was a recommendation made by Nithin long ago, and it still may be plausible. It seems that Europcar has reasonable rental rates (when renting for a week and split between 5 people). To rent a van (or large car) and drive to our shut-in little town of Kaiserslautern, Germany, watch our match, sleep in our van (I promise to be safe mom), have a blast for a week and save some money. Now this option would still be expensive ($150-$200, for tickets and travel). But it would be for a longer period of time, a lot more fun, and would allow us to see more of France, which has very little time on our itinerary.

Obviously we need to be very thrifty with our spending, but now and again we also need to splurge and create some stories we can still tell when we're 80! This is merely the first of many such decisions - shall we be practical, realistic, wise with our money and not go to Germany? Or shall we devote ourselves to the sense of adventure, be smelly, uncomfortable, and risk having an incredible time going to an event we will probably never get to see for the rest of our lives, and take any short cut we see to get there!?

This trip is going to be awesome!