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is not always the quickest option Part 2 - Continuing from "Traveling within Europe" - By Anne-Marie D
When you map out your trip, look at the alternatives. A good guide book is fundamental as it's not always obvious and even locals might not know all the options. You need to take into consideration things like costs and time involved. Are there high-speed trains? Are there low-cost carriers flying between the destinations?
To give you an example; You are in Utrecht (the Netherlands) and you'd like to go to Frankfurt (Germany). Now, you may like to fly. You will encounter the following problems; first, there are no low-cost carriers. So it's likely that you'll end up spending 300 Euro for a 1 hour flight. And your misery doesn't end there. As Schiphol is a terribly big airport you need to be there early, so your trip will likely take you about 5 hours. Whereas, if you'd take the train from Utrecht to Frankfurt, you'd do it in 3 hours and for less than 100 Euro (and that's when you don't have a student discount card, Interrail or other Rail Pass).
To check on train times and prices, I recommend the German Rail website for trips ending in or originating from Germany, http://www.TheTrainline.com for the UK and Tren Italia for Italy. For other countries, just type in 'Train' and 'Country' (the country of your choice, of course) in your search engine and you'll be directed to a train site for that country. The ones I've used all had English versions, so monolinguists need not fear.
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