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Jeoh posted:It's probably not gonna get any higher any time soon. It's worked for me before (I prepaid for all my Northern Ireland hotels for my Fall 2016 vacation the day after Brexit.)
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Jul 16, 2022 20:23
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kuddles posted:Oh I know, I'm just anticipating my Canadian dollar will likely also get lower before I go so I'm wondering if I should take advantage of the decent exchange rate now. I wouldn’t get *cash* now but if your travel plans are set and or refundable I would book and pay for everything now, at least if you’re the type of traveler who anyway likes to have Airbnbs and such set in advance. If you prefer flexibility when travelling then maybe I wouldn’t book everything now even though it might save you 10% compared to booking in September - since also exchange rates could easily stay steady like this for a while too, although I imagine eventually it will reset to Euro > USD since inflation is quite a bit higher in the US than in Europe. I always book my overnight stays way in advance because I massively prefer airbnbs to hotels, but if I was just doing hotels not sure I’d bother booking this far out since it won’t be high season when you’re there. Ymmv.
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Jul 16, 2022 23:01
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This year in Europe I think it's all high season. A lot of hotels for my trip were already sold out when I was booking in early June.
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Jul 17, 2022 00:04
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Anyone know if this low euro value is affecting the euro-GBP rate, and if so, in what way?
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Jul 17, 2022 07:58
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Carbon dioxide posted:Anyone know if this low euro value is affecting the euro-GBP rate, and if so, in what way? I googled that for you and it looks like EUR-GBP is generally pretty stable? I thought forex issue wasn't the Euro, it's that US inflation is doing stupid things to the dollar.
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Jul 17, 2022 08:15
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Drone posted:I googled that for you and it looks like EUR-GBP is generally pretty stable? Yes. The Euro is not dropping in value compared to e.g. yen, AU$, NZ$, CHF it's the US is gaining hugely in value against everything else, even against the Swiss franc. I don't really understand how or why considering that the US has the highest inflation and did the most money pumping during the pandemic, but economics is a mystery to me so I have no idea if this is sustainable or what. CHF and CA$ have gained a little against the Euro, but not at all comparable to the US$ gain. kuddles posted:This year in Europe I think it's all high season. A lot of hotels for my trip were already sold out when I was booking in early June. Yeah also that's kind of true. We tried to go the Opal Coast of France over Ascension day weekend booking 10 days beforehand - admittedly a very high season for an extremely "B-list" destination - and literally every hotel and airbnb within 50 km of the coast was sold out. We ended up going to Alsace which was also sold out literally everywhere within 50 km of anywhere nice in Alsace, except for a super nice Airbnb that just opened up when I checked due to a cancellation. We ended up booking the Opal Coast for Whit Monday three weeks in advance and there we had like one place available. I booked the entire rest of my summer stays right then in early June due to that experience.
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Jul 17, 2022 17:05
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Cant figure out how to get a taxi in Rome at the airport. One tried to charge 50 so I demanded out and tossed him 2 euro change. It’s been 2 hours of walking around trying to find my way out, but now i have an hour trek on foot to the hotel and it’s so hot. All the taxis I saw pointed me another direction saying local taxi that way. Thank god I’m alone I’d hate to drag anyone else through this hell after a 10 hour flight.
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Jul 18, 2022 10:07
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Cheese Thief posted:Cant figure out how to get a taxi in Rome at the airport. One tried to charge 50 so I demanded out and tossed him 2 euro change. It’s been 2 hours of walking around trying to find my way out, but now i have an hour trek on foot to the hotel and it’s so hot. All the taxis I saw pointed me another direction saying local taxi that way. Thank god I’m alone I’d hate to drag anyone else through this hell after a 10 hour flight. Lmao. Which airport? I think the last time I was at Fiumicino and there was a bus that went to the center for a few euros.
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Jul 18, 2022 10:59
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Cheese Thief posted:Cant figure out how to get a taxi in Rome at the airport. One tried to charge 50 so I demanded out and tossed him 2 euro change. It’s been 2 hours of walking around trying to find my way out, but now i have an hour trek on foot to the hotel and it’s so hot. All the taxis I saw pointed me another direction saying local taxi that way. Thank god I’m alone I’d hate to drag anyone else through this hell after a 10 hour flight. lol Seems to be a fixed rate by the airport authorities. Please keep us updated on your travel escapades. And yeah, buses are around 5-7 euros, nice one cheesethief. Helios Grime fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 11:10
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Cheese Thief posted:Cant figure out how to get a taxi in Rome at the airport. One tried to charge 50 so I demanded out and tossed him 2 euro change. It’s been 2 hours of walking around trying to find my way out, but now i have an hour trek on foot to the hotel and it’s so hot. All the taxis I saw pointed me another direction saying local taxi that way. Thank god I’m alone I’d hate to drag anyone else through this hell after a 10 hour flight. You can take a taxi for 50, a train for 14, or a bus for 7 euro. why do people post in this thread when they're literally at an airport instead of just checking with the tourist information there???
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Jul 18, 2022 11:15
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Helios Grime posted:lol I was walking along a highway and venting, but everything worked out fine. Good to know the rates were fixed, I wish there were an information desk at the airport but I wandered around from 7:45 to 11 and didn’t see any help. Thank you for the tip, will learn to ride the bus tomorrow!
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Jul 18, 2022 11:40
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I struggle to believe that the trains and buses were not clearly signed multiple times on your way out of arrivals.
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Jul 18, 2022 11:48
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Bus tickets are kind of a PITA in Rome (you have to buy paper tickets in a Tabacchi, they won't accept credit cards for them, and you have to get them validated on the bus). If you're going to be hitting the sights the Roma Pass is pretty good value if you go to the expensive places first (first one's free then you get a discount) plus it gives you free public transport on the Metro and busses for the duration of the card. If it's still hot as balls like it was when we visited in June, catacombs are nice and cool, the park around the Terrazza del Pincio was nice and cool (but the granite (crushed ice drinks) were way too expensive!) and the MAXXI was nice and cool plus I cannot recommend the Salgado exhibition there highly enough, it was really incredible.
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Jul 18, 2022 12:11
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greazeball posted:Bus tickets are kind of a PITA in Rome (you have to buy paper tickets in a Tabacchi, they won't accept credit cards for them, and you have to get them validated on the bus). If you're going to be hitting the sights the Roma Pass is pretty good value if you go to the expensive places first (first one's free then you get a discount) plus it gives you free public transport on the Metro and busses for the duration of the card. There's an app now, MyCicero. You can NO LONGER buy tickets at the Tabacchi. It's way easier (even initial setup is fine), it's just now that 95% of the information online is wrong and outdated. I did the whole thing while on the bus a few weeks ago, and like five minutes after I finished doing it we were controlled and like 2/3rds of the people were thrown off the bus and fined. Also €50 from Fiumicino to downtown sounds like a reasonable taxi price to me. It's pretty far! But there's also like... a super obviously signposted train that's like €12 for the Leonardo express or like €4 for the less obviously signposted local train that follows the exact same route but stops everywhere along the way.
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Jul 18, 2022 12:17
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distortion park posted:I struggle to believe that the trains and buses were not clearly signed multiple times on your way out of arrivals. Oh you aren't aware who cheesethief is. Well, if he keeps up posting here, strap in for some fun times.
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Jul 18, 2022 12:18
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Saladman posted:There's an app now, MyCicero. You can NO LONGER buy tickets at the Tabacchi. It's way easier (even initial setup is fine), it's just now that 95% of the information online is wrong and outdated. I did the whole thing while on the bus a few weeks ago, and like five minutes after I finished doing it we were controlled and like 2/3rds of the people were thrown off the bus and fined. Oh hey, that probably means no more inspections until September! It's great they're getting rid of those tickets though, we just couldn't figure out which app was supposed to work so we got a few tickets and tapped in to the metro with our credit cards (and took a few unticketed bus rides) and it was all right.
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Jul 18, 2022 12:28
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I couldn't find anything about tabacchis no longer selling tickets when I googled just now, but we tried like four shops in central Rome near Trevi Fountain and none of them sold bus tickets, so I looked for an online solution and was surprised that it was actually well-implemented. A lot of other places are getting rid of those tickets though, like Paris got rid of the carnets of tickets in March 2022, pushing everyone towards the metro card or smartphone apps, although I think you can still get single tickets (but maybe have to go to a manned desk?).
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Jul 18, 2022 13:04
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Saladman posted:I couldn't find anything about tabacchis no longer selling tickets when I googled just now, but we tried like four shops in central Rome near Trevi Fountain and none of them sold bus tickets, so I looked for an online solution and was surprised that it was actually well-implemented. The buses in Paris have my favourite system actually - you can text a number with your bus number and they bill you + reply with the ticket.(it's explained on the bus stand) Way easier and quicker than messing around with an app or even a ticket machine.
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Jul 18, 2022 13:07
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MyCicero lol yeah, i've flown into fiumicino twice. the first time I took a taxi to the center, and it cost quite a bit (40 euros sounds about right). the second time, I took the Leonardo Express which is fairly easy to use. It's not the Arlanda Express, but what is?
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Jul 18, 2022 14:48
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Saladman posted:I couldn't find anything about tabacchis no longer selling tickets when I googled just now, but we tried like four shops in central Rome near Trevi Fountain and none of them sold bus tickets, so I looked for an online solution and was surprised that it was actually well-implemented. Tabacchi tickets are still most definitely a thing everywhere else in Italy, just confirmed in Genoa and Turin, and last year in Bari. Rome was a few years back though. distortion park posted:The buses in Paris have my favourite system actually - you can text a number with your bus number and they bill you + reply with the ticket.(it's explained on the bus stand) Way easier and quicker than messing around with an app or even a ticket machine.
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Jul 18, 2022 15:11
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Taxis are always a scam in Europe, even if you don't get overcharged there might be high fixed rates. You can almost always avoid taking one unless you have to be at an airport really early/late. For Amsterdam they are like €50 as well, and the airport is a 10 minute train ride (like €4.50) from the center with night trains running too.
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Jul 18, 2022 15:29
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Drone posted:Supposed to hit 37 here in central Germany in a few days. The "best" tactic I've found is airing out the apartment really early in the morning, then closing all the windows and roller shutters and turtling up until the sun goes down. It sounds counterintuitive but in a house as well-insulated as ours, it keeps the overall temperature cooler than outside on superhot days. I'm sure this depends hugely on the build date of your building, but today it's 35°C outside right now and my apartment inside is 24° on one side and 25° on the other, and it's now 17:30. It was 22°/23° when I left this morning at 8:30 and closed all the windows, after an overnight low of 18. Shutters are all the way down and windows are all closed, nothing else special except making sure it got as cool as possible last night by leaving all windows and doors open all night and closing them at 8am when I got up and when the air temp got to 22. We're on a top floor apartment of a flat-roofed building, with 270° of exposure facing E, N, and W. I'm honestly surprised by how good modern insulation can be; this is my first time with digital room thermometers to numerically test it. OTOH I have friends in Amsterdam in an older place where it's 31° outside and ... 31° inside, so they are melting because rolling shutters aren't common in the Netherlands. I guess theoretically they could put aluminum foil on the outside of all of their windows, but they bought an AC unit a bedroom couple years ago instead. 37° tomorrow and overnight low of 21° tonight will really put things to the test.
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Jul 18, 2022 16:39
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I am in Amsterdam, it is 32C today, I don't have shutters or even curtains on the east-facing side, and it's still not that bad. The east-facing side got up to 25.5C now, and the west-facing side with curtains remained at 23C (I had closed the door between them). This is a fairly new apartment complex though. Buildings here are built to keep the cold out, but that also helps to keep the cold in when necessary. I had everything open for a while in the early morning to get it down to 22-23C. However, I know that if the weather would remain for this for like a week, it slowly gets hotter inside every day, with temperatures up to 27.5-28C. That's because the neighbouring apartments also heat up and immediately thwart my efforts to cool down my own place during the night. Entropist fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Jul 18, 2022 |
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Jul 18, 2022 16:50
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I decided to spend End of July/start of August in Wales instead of France, where I normally live, to avoid the hottest part of the year. Jokes on me now because there's no AC in Wales (or indeed the UK) and it's now hot inside as well as outside!
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Jul 18, 2022 16:53
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Doesn't seem like the heatwave has hit here yet. It was hot but not remarkably so.Entropist posted:Taxis are always a scam in Europe, even if you don't get overcharged there might be high fixed rates. You can almost always avoid taking one unless you have to be at an airport really early/late. My flight to Turin was pretty late and got delayed by like 90 minutes so we arrived just before the last bus departed and had no chance of catching it. The 20 minute ride cost more than a 1.5 hour flight for two, by a lot.
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Jul 18, 2022 16:56
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Helios Grime posted:Oh you aren't aware who cheesethief is. Well, if he keeps up posting here, strap in for some fun times. Please don’t. I’m kind of dumb but I don’t want to distract from the high quality thread. It’s very useful to read. I love Rome so far, I even took up smoking MS cigarette, famous Italian brand. Buying a bus ticket to Marsala soon, and that info will come in handy.
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Jul 19, 2022 08:00
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Picking up smoking while on European vacation is certainly a choice 
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Jul 19, 2022 08:50
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Drone posted:Picking up smoking while on European vacation is certainly a choice I did that too once upon a time, gotta smoke some Gauloises while in Paris. I used to buy local cigarettes to try them out when I travelled places, until I tried the absolutely disgusting Tunisian cigarettes and forever gave up on sampling that aspect of local cultures. I'm not a smoker and never was though since it smells terrible and I have to clean my hands and wash out my mouth every time I smoke a cigarette. God knows why I was doing that since the nicotine rush was gone by the time I had the taste out of my mouth and smell off my hands, but it was kind of like how you feel like you have to try a local liqueur (until you try brennivin and give up) or food specialty (until you smell hakarl and retch). I probably still have some half-finished packs of cigarettes from 10 years ago in my smoke box from different places in the world with some very, very dry and lovely tobacco.
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Jul 19, 2022 10:23
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I still have four or five packs of Georgian Lucky Strikes floating around somewhere in my apartment, bought in 2013 at something like a fifth of what they'd have costed at home. At the time, I smoked about two packs a year, so I bought a carton, of course. I was young and stupid
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Jul 19, 2022 11:54
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Drone posted:Picking up smoking while on European vacation is certainly a choice I did when I was 16 and they were sold in vending machines in Germany. But I quit as soon as I got back to the States 'cause it's a lot harder to buy smokes when you're underage and they aren't in vending machines.
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Jul 19, 2022 14:31
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Helios Grime posted:Oh you aren't aware who cheesethief is. Well, if he keeps up posting here, strap in for some fun times. It's the most entertaining this thread has ever been imo. I'm definitely looking forward to some more great travel tips. MagicCube fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Jul 20, 2022 |
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Jul 20, 2022 05:04
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Sure I bet. So I am headed to Cluj-Napoca and then Bucharest in a few weeks. I only have a one way ticket. Will customs let me in without a set departure date? I’d like to take the thread’s advice and head to Slovenia afterwards, but haven’t actually decided. Has anyone here rented a car in Slovenia, how was it?
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Jul 20, 2022 06:57
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Cheese Thief posted:Sure I bet. Even if you haven't decided yet, prepare a specific realistic plan that you can tell them if they question you about it. There is nothing more suspicious if you tell them you have no idea when and how you want to leave.
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Jul 20, 2022 07:07
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nvm apparently Romania isn't in Schengen.
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Jul 20, 2022 11:04
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Cheese Thief posted:Sure I bet. If you're an American passport holder, then 99% probability "yes", but yeah there is some small possibility they will question you about it. TBH I've flown into Europe on one-way tickets twice before having a Schengen passport, and neither time did they care or notice. Renting a car in most of Europe is fine, although occasionally in a handful of countries they are dicks about requiring international driver's permits (e.g. Italy, and especially N. Italy). IDPs are lovely little xerox-quality paper translations of your license that expire after like 12 months so you have to constantly get them before every trip, and they're almost never asked for. It looks like it is also theoretically mandatory in Slovenia for people with non-EU driver's licenses, although anecdotally the enforcement of that seems to be very rare except for people whose driver's licenses are not issued in Latin script. (E: Looking just now out of curiosity, North Korea and Japan are the only countries I looked for which has a driver's license which is not ALSO written in Latin Script, even like Russia, Myanmar, and Yemen all have their licenses bilingual in English, and Russia has it in Latin characters and pictographical; IDPs are famously very much mandatory in Japan fwiw. For South Korea I see both English and Korean-only licenses so I can't quite tell what's going on there.) I'd look (or ask) on TripAdvisor to see what the actual requirement of IDPs is in actuality in Slovenia since I imagine you didn't get one before travelling here. I very briefly looked and see that it is required but did not see a single anecdote of it actually being enforced. My parents got one IDP in like 2004 and the only time they were ever asked for it was renting a car in Egypt and a couple times in Italy and I think once in Spain, and every time the expired one was fine because the people renting cars DGAF, but it's a little bit of a tossup. Apparently the fine in Italy if you don't have an IDP on you and the police stop you and ask is... €38. E: Also IDPs do make sense in the very rare cases that you are renting non-standard vehicles, as I guess without an IDP it would be hard for a cop to know if your license was valid for trailers, for motorbikes, valid for large-class vehicles, etc. I guess they're not 100% stupid but ... still, they should last the lifetime of the goddamn license and not only 12-24 months. Also in a lot of European countries they do accept licenses that are issued in English, without a requirement for an IDP, e.g. Germany, so it's hard to even know in advance when you do or don't need one. Saladman fucked around with this message at 12:48 on Jul 20, 2022 |
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Jul 20, 2022 12:32
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Renting a car in Slovenia is fine. I can't remember if Mr. Hookshot got asked for his IDL when we got ours or not, but I don't think he did. You also just have to be careful about what countries you're allowed to drive in with the car because it's not going to be all the Balkans.
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Jul 20, 2022 16:57
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Saladman posted:Renting a car in most of Europe is fine, although occasionally in a handful of countries they are dicks about requiring international driver's permits (e.g. Italy, and especially N. Italy). IDPs are lovely little xerox-quality paper translations of your license that expire after like 12 months so you have to constantly get them before every trip, and they're almost never asked for. Funny enough, the one time I actually took the time to get an IDP was in Milan, where I wasn't asked for it. I've rented cars in Italy, Spain, France, the UK, and South Africa and haven't been asked for an IDP yet.  This is going to bite me in the rear end at some point right?
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Jul 20, 2022 16:58
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I've never had to actually use an IDP, no matter what the theory said. Everywhere in the EU, obviously, but also South Africa, US and Ukraine all were fine with just an EU license. The cool think about the IDP is that there are two types, one expires in 1 year and another in 3(?) and, theoretically, some countries accept one but not the other, so you, theoretically, need to maintain both if you travel a lot.
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Jul 20, 2022 17:26
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poo poo, that reminds me I need to get an IDP just in case before October.
HookShot fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Jul 20, 2022 |
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Jul 20, 2022 21:39
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I remember the first/only time I got an IDP it seemed like it must be a scam, because there was no way that a piece of cardboard like that would be accepted as anything close to official.
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Jul 21, 2022 03:31
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