Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

Our quest to the northern most city in the world went off the rails basically right away.

After landing in Paris, we realized that every single hotel was over $150 per night, all of the trains north were booked out for at least a week, and everything was going to be 4x the cost that we had originally thought.

We were staring at something that was either going to be impossible, or cause bankruptcy. $1000 just in trains to get us to Northern Germany. $250 a night for a hostel in Amsterdam. Literally no trains from Paris to Brussels. Just… bah.

After going through all 5 stages of grief over a bottle of wine, we realized that the trip that we had in mind - the easy route, the one where we go straight north, in a line, that makes sense - was just not going to happen.

There just wasn't any reasonable way to do it by land.

But then, our friends from Germany told us about this totally trip-saving best-travel-deal-ever—the 9 euro train pass.

You see, Germany decided, in a bid to bolster tourism this summer, that they would offer a month long unlimited use rail pass for the entire country, for just 9 euros.

Yep, you read that right. As long as you're taking the regional or local-only trains, you can ride them as much as you want around the entire country for the whole month of August for just 9 euros. It's honestly a bit bonkers.

Imagine if the USA had an offer for the month of August that, for $9, you could get as much gas as you wanted to travel the country and go anywhere. I say gas because we don't really have a comparable train network in the USA - not like Germany, where the trains go literally everywhere.

That's the type of deal this is. Hard to imagine, right? Such an audacious plan, and from our viewpoint, it's definitely, definitely working.

So we took the cheapest form of transportation from Paris to a town right on the border of France and Germany, walked across, and started our 9 euro Germany adventure to bring us closer to Longyearbyen.

But, because the deal was so good, we decided to set aside a few days and see Germany on the way up. Bringing in our tourism dollars to the country when we would have likely skipped it entirely.

Staying at hotels, eating at restaurants, going to wineries - all stuff we wouldn't have done without the 9 euro pass.

And it's not just us - the trains are PACKED full of people, from all over, going all over the country, especially to places that don't typically come across as tourist places, because of the restriction to regional only trains.

It's a long term plan, this 9 euro deal, no doubt, and one with likely hard-to-impossible to track success metrics, but from our viewpoint, it's bringing in a LOT of tourists.

It did literally save our quest from failing before we even got to start. Without it, we likely would have gone home, or went to an entirely different continent to travel. We definitely would not have made it to Longyearbyen.

Actually, we may still not, but at least we'll have a shot at it. It's a long, long way up there.

Today we're enjoying our freedom of movement (I'm writing this on a train), and slowly working our way north on the slower-but-prettier regional train network. This rail pass has probably saved us over $1000 per person already, and we're not even out of Germany yet.

The downside of this whole 9 euro deal is just how incredibly busy all the cities are. It seems like, if you're a tourist in Europe this summer, you're in Germany.

Hotels are in bigger cities are full, or mega overpriced - even the budget ones are $150 per night - town centers are packed. But the silver lining is that it has been teaching us to be more clever (read: frugal) travelers—using our credit card and hotel points that we've saved up over the past few years to offset costs, going grocery shopping, and the best part of it all— we are getting to experience smaller, more rural areas, while having lots and lots of kebab and muesli.

Now that I think about it, it's not all that different. Just way, way more expensive.

Today

Today we're heading to a town that none of us have ever heard of, to stay at a beautiful (at least it looked that way online) Airbnb, and enjoy a side of Germany that we would have never seen otherwise.

It's a good day.

The (Near) Future

Heading north, north, north.

Videos This Week

We should probably get new shoes at this point - we’ve put a LOT of miles on these things.

Jeonju was awesome :)

We threw a dart at a Korean map and traveled wherever it landed (we know, no one ever on the Internet has ever done this right? :D).

See you next Sunday…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs last year, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles. It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

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