Hi there,
I hope you’ve had a blessed week?
My best friend Alpha and I decided to take a spontaneous trip to London last week. We decided that we wanted to go on Friday and by Sunday everything was booked and Monday evening we started our journey.
You must be wondering how we got everything done so quickly and how it was traveling to the UK with all of the Covid regulations? Well, in this post I’ll give you a detailed description of how we planned a spontaneous fun trip to London on a budget:
- The story
- Government regulations
- The budgets
- Telling our parents
- Telling our friends
I hope you will enjoy this post!
The Story of the spontaneous trip to London
So it all started of with a message from my best friend saying “Impulsive thoughts haha.” Initially I thought he wanted to order something he didn’t need or buy another pair of shoes (inside joke), but after he said that it was something else, I immediately said: “Don’t travel anywhere lol.”
He proceeded to tell me that he made a new friend on Omegle and that his friend had invited him over to go visit, as you might’ve guessed I thought he was insane, but he kept insisting that he had a good feeling about that friend (we will see about that) and I knew that he needed a vacation & I jokingly said you can only go if you take me. We laughed it off and continued our day.
A few minutes after I decided to check the flights, because booking a train last minute was going to cost us a fortune, then I found some cheap flights from Eindhoven and Flixbus tickets that were affordable. When I told him this he was convinced and wanted to start booking. That is how our trip to London begun.
Government regulations
Of course in a time like this you can’t just travel around without any consequences, so we had to check both our government requirements and the requirements in the UK.
We were both vaccinated so it made a short trip of four days possible. We only had to book a Covid test in Belgium, one in the UK, fill out passenger location forms and make sure our ID’s and passports were in order. That’s where the issues begun…
We had set a budget per person before we started booking everything, but when we had to book the covid tests, things became a little iffy. We were counting on our free travel Covid tests (which they had awarded the citizens of Belgium, but because we got vaccinated too long ago, we were not eligible for the free tests, which immediately crunched our budget, but more about the budget later. 😉
It’s so important that you check the government regulations of each country that you travel through, because that can save you a lot of drama. The trip to London would have costed us so much less if we had checked with the government of the Netherlands as well.
The budgets
Which finally brings us to the budget. After we had decided we were going to do this, the first thing I did was open an excel sheet and write down every possible cost that we could have and the amounts we actually spent on it, for the expenses we hadn’t made yet such as food, we made an estimate that we would stick with.
The trip ended up costing way more than we had planned due to the fact that there were a lot of issues at the airport and with the Covid tests. So I added on to the list of things to consider, as you see below.
I created a travel and a budget planner that can help you plan out all your expenses and if you’re going with friends you can devide all the costs so that you can see how much it’ll cost per person.
Click here to download the travel and budget planner.
Telling our parents
Because it was super random and very last minute planned, I first told my sister, before I told my mom. My sister was kind of bummed, because she was moving out that same week, but soon after she was happy, because I could finally buy her the rose tea she’s been wanting for months now.
Telling my mom made me nervous, usually when I travel it’s for a day or two and I’m usually max 3 hours away. It’s my second time to London by myself, but with the Covid situation there I knew it’d make mom uncomfortable. My timing was also completely off, so yeah… I had to create a set up to talk to her & she was not amused by it at all, but she “allowed” us. Well at that point there wasn’t much she could do about it. I do not advice using this method. After everything we went through I realized the importance of asking for permission earlier, why you will see next week…
Alpha literally just told his dad Sunday afternoon “I’m going to London this week” his dad said “okay” and that was it, LOL.
Telling our friends
After we had booked our Covid tests and flights, that’s when we knew that it was for real for real, so Alpha told his friend. I also have a friend in the UK & I let him know as well, both of them were really happy that we were going to go over there & couldn’t wait to meet up with us.
If you also feel like watching the vlog of this trip, you will find it on Alpha’s youtube channel, click here to watch.
If you want to read more posts like this click here.
If you want to keep up with my day to day journey, click here.
Have a blessed week!
Big love,
Joy
