Purple Binder: Complete!

For the last major trips, we've collected all our planning materials in The Purple Binder, and that's where I (David) have been collecting my planning pages for the Germany trip.

Today I printed out the last copy of the planning pages and the last Google Maps and recollated everything. In the binder are:

• Pages for each region with tables with a row for each attraction.
• Printouts of the e-tickets for the flight and for each of three Bahn (rail) trips.
• The emails confirming hotel reservations in eight towns.
• Printouts of Google maps to locate each hotel
• More Google maps to show road routes between cities and to some attractions.
• Printed web pages from several attractions

Marian did this same job for the New Zealand trip last year. Her Purple Binder set a standard that I've tried to match for this trip. Anyway, the flight, rail trips, rental car, and all hotel stays but one are booked and in the binder. Nothing more to do until it's time to pack!

Planning Resources

Guidebooks

Our primary info source for planning this trip was the Rough Guide to Germany. Secondarily we used Earl Steinbicker's Day Trips in Germany. As we go along in the trip we'll comment on how well these guides hold up.

Using the German Web

An important third source was the web. Rough Guide is especially good about providing URLs for every town, museum, castle and park. Often those pages prove to be in German, but that's rarely an impediment. First, lots of German sites have a little UK flag for English translations (also Polish, sometimes French). For example the excellent Railway site, bahn.de, offers both a UK-English and a US-English version. Often these translated pages are incomplete; only some pages are in the English set. But that doesn't matter because of Google's translation service. You can paste some German text into it and get an instant translation, or paste in a URL and up comes the website with all text translated. And if you click a link in a translated page, the new page gets translated automatically as well. The translation isn't perfect but it is serviceable. Also, any part of the site that is a graphic, or built on the fly by javascript or the like, isn't translated. That means that most buttons and many menus are still in German. No matter, with a little care you can surf the german internet very well.