Prague: The Remix

I forgot we leave Prague and come back. Let's say we stay at Hotel Julian.

They will pick us up from the train station for 400 CZK ($20)  and the train station for 600 CZK ($30).

Link to their public transit site.

Looks like we can take the No. 9 tram from the Švandovo divadlo stop near the hotel towards Spojovaci. Get off at the Hlavni nadrazi stop. There may be a short walk or some sort of express bus. It's hard to tell from the map. When we get in from Cesky Krumlov, we can take the No. ‎9 tram towards Sidliske Repy.

The airport express bus from Hlavni nadrazi (train station) for 40 CZK ($2) each.


There are also express buses to/from Dejvická and Zlicin, the western ends of the line for Metro Lines A and B, respectively. Neither puts us in a better position than the main train station. We'd have to take a bus to a Metro to a tram.

Train: Vienna to Prague

We leave from Wien Mielding.The website basically tells us to take buses or commuter trains. But it's like 3 buses. That sounds confusing. I prefer the Metro. Maybe we'll figure out the tram system, but it doesn't appear to help us here. From our apartment to Wien Mielding, here's what we have to do:

We can take the 0 tram back towards Landstrabe Wien Mitte. Get on the Green Line U-Bahn (U4). Take that towards Hutteldorf. Get off at Längenfeldgasse. Transfer to the Brown Line U-Bahn (U6). Take that towards

Siebenhirten. Get off at Philadelphiabrücke. That should be Wien Mielding.‎‎

‎

We can get into our place in Prague after 3 pm.

We can leave at 9:33, get in at 2:18

12:33 - 5:15

2:33 - 7:18.

If we feel ambitious, we can take the 9:33. Otherwise, the 12:33 works pretty well. We can get into Prague, find our apartment, and head out to dinner. It is the 5-year anniversary of our first date.

Vienna: Train Station to Apartment

Let's just say we take 1:10 train from Budapest Keleti P.

We get to Wien Meidling at 3:46 and Wien Westbahnhof at 4 PM. I think those are the east and west train stations, respectively.

Either will work. Westbahnhof looks a little less confusing via public transit. And we use that to get to Prague, so probably worth learning it.

Westbahnhof is at Europaplatz 1, 1150, Wien, Austria. The house is at Dampfschiffstrasse 12.

Their public transit website it nice. It tells you what direction, what line, and has pretty little maps.Here are the directions. We can get a 72-hour card for about $19. Obviously we are there for more than 72 hours.

Basically, take the U3 U-bahn line (orange) towards Simmering. Get off at Landstrabe Wien Mitte. You walk a little southeast towards Invalidenstrabe Street. Take the O tram north toward Praterstern S+U.  It says to get off at Hintere Zollamtsstraße and walk, which we can. Franzenbrucke is two stops after that, might be closer. We just walk back across the bridge and hand a right, should be there.

16:01 16:05	from Wien, Europaplatz 1 to Westbahnhof	PDF   PDF		Walk/escalator down//escalator down about 4 minutes about 0,0 km
16:05 16:14	from Westbahnhof to Landstraße	PDF		U-Bahn U3 Simmering
				escalator up/elevator up/walking distance about 5 minutes
16:19 16:22	from Landstraße-Wien Mitte S+U to Hintere Zollamtsstraße	PDF		Straßenbahn O Praterstern S+U
16:22 16:28	from Hintere Zollamtsstraße to Wien, Dampfschiffstraße 12	PDF		Walk about 6 minutes about 0,4 km

Train: Budapest to Vienna

We travel from Budapest to Vienna on Monday, May 21.

Looks like I have us staying near the wrong train station. We need to get to Budapest Keleti P for the train to Vienna. It's here. We can cancel Radisson Blu, but the Novotel Centrum (which is walking distance from the right train station) is sold out. On the plus side, the Centrum is a little harder to get to from the airport. My bad, I screwed this up.


We can take the 6 tram east/south from Otakon towards Móricz Zsigmond körtér felé . Get off at Blaha Lujza tér ‎red line metro station. Take that towards Örs vezér tere M+H, get off at Keleti pályaudvar‎ - the train station.

Link to the public transportation website.

For $17 each, we can get unlimited rides on the buses, trams, and metros for 72 hours.

Trains leave every 2 hours on the 10s. 9:10, 11:10, 1:10 and take 2.5 hours to Vienna. We can get into our place at 3:15. I think we aim for the 11:10 or 1:10.

Budapest Airport to Hotel

Our flight gets into Liszt Ferenc International Airport Terminal 2a at 8:50 am.

We can't check into the Radisson Blu until 2 pm. The hotel doesn't appear to offer transportation from the airport. It is in Zone 6.

Zona Taxi runs from the airport to Zones 1-4. It costs $25 for the two of us, but I'm not sure if it will go to our hotel.

For $20, we can take a shuttle. Basically we tell the driver where we want to go, and when the shuttle van is full, it leaves the airport. It may go all over the city, depending on who else is on board.

Or we can take bus 200E to the blue line metro station Kobánya-Kispest. From there, we ride the blue line to Nyugati pályaudvar‎, (the main train station) then walk a little southeast down Terez Korut Street to our hotel. It will probably take about an hour. Transit pass is $2.50 each. I assume we'll need one for the bus and one for the train. I imagine there's a public transit pass we can buy for our 3 days there if we think we'll need it.


It looks like we can also take bus 200E from Terminal 2 to Terminal 1. From there, we get on Személy train towards Nyugati pályaudvar‎. Trains leave every half hour and cost $1.75.


I think we should plan to take the bus to the blue line. Hopefully we can buy one pass for both.

Vienna to Cesky Krumlov

So, there are a bunch of options, but I'll try to summarize.

We can take a train from Vienna to Cesky Krumlov, but we probably have to connect through Linz, Prague, and/or Budweis. If we buy the train pass, it's cost effective to travel by train.

A bus ticket from Vienna to CK is about $60/each. The ride is only 3 hours, but it generally leaves at like 1 PM, so you don't get into CK until 4 PM or so.

So, we could travel to to CK Friday morning, spend Friday night there, hike and Saturday, and then either head to Prague and/or Budweis Saturday evening or Sunday morning. I guess I'd like to hike and get drunk in CK. I'd prefer to hike first, but if that take s whole day, we'd have to do that on Saturday, not Friday afternoon.

Or, we could head to Prague Friday, then do a couple days in CK Sunday or Monday. We don't leave until Thursday.

I don't mind keeping our options open, but it would then behoove us to have open-ended lodging plans, i.e. hotels, not apartments. Also, we'll want to pack light, maybe do laundry more than once. That's hard in a hotel, but I'm sure we can pay them to do it, although it expensive. I'm sure places also have laundry mats, I don't think everyone in Europe has their own washer/dryer like we do in the US.

I don't know if we think Linz is worth seeing. We could take a train from Vienna to Linz, look around, then catch an afternoon bus to CK. I think it leaves from Linz at 2, is cheaper, and only takes an hour and a half. It's probably the same bus that left Vienna at 1. But again, that means we don't want to be hauling too much luggage around.

Flight Options Part 2

Did some research on the cost of flying city to city in Europe. I added Berlin just in case we find cheap round trip flights to/from there from Chicago. I'm just guessing that might be a good option.

I would prefer to travel via train, but I thought we should at least look into flying some parts of the journey just so we can weigh our various transportation options. We can combo train, plane, car, boat, jet ski, etc. as we see necessary.

I priced things out on or near Sept. 1, 2011, obviously I can't know exactly what day works the best. If non-stop was available, I selected that, even if there was a one stop that was much cheaper. I assumed that if we couldn't get non-stop, it wasn't worth comparing to the train.

Scroll the embedded table below or view the full sized table here.

Train Options

I did some research re: train options between the cities that we are looking to explore.

Based on my research we can travel between the cities we want to go fairly easy via train and fairly cheap.

I'm thinking that we can fly in/out of Warsaw/Krakow and travel to Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Prague, and back to Warsaw/Krakow via train.

Vienna to Prague is 4 1/2 hours via train for $147 a person.
Warsaw to Budapest is $274 a person.
Krakow to Budapest is $167 a person.
Prague to Warsaw is $143 a person.
Prague to Krakow is $200 a person.
We can do these legs overnight since they are longer.

It's a no brainer to do Budapest, Bratislava, and Vienna because they are so close together.

Flight Options

I know we've both looked into this a bunch, but thought I'd get something written down. I just looked through a series of dates and airports to get a feel for flight prices. I used a 12-day Wed.-Mon. trip like we did for Scandinavia. Not that we have to do the exact same thing again, just needed a starting point.

I have no idea how much flight prices will change from now until then, but I wanted something so we could start thinking about cities and the order we'll see them. We  likely will not go to every city on this list. I looked a round trip and one ways. I'd love to find a cheap non-stop round trip, but did not have much luck there. Two individual segment one-way tickets is more expensive than a round trip, but we have to factor in the train or plane ticket to get us back to our round trip airport. For example, if we fly into Prague and then travel on, we'll have to get back to Prague to fly home if we do a round trip. Getting back there costs money.

Scroll the embedded table below or view the full sized table here.