Paris on a budget...part 1

We all know that when you go to Paris on vacation all you want to do is go shopping and enjoy a little romance, but what do you do when you go with your children?

Bois de Boulogne

Well there are so many fun exciting adventures you can have with your children in Paris that are Free or low cost.

For example there are a lot of very large beautiful parks and gardens in Paris. Here is a list of parks and the activities available:

Bois De Boulogne

Area: 845 hectares

Lakes, waterfalls, Chateaus, playgrounds, sports centres, bicycle tracks, horse tracks, walking tracks, restaurants, fairgrounds...

The park is free entry, the playgrounds are free and fun, the walking tracks are great and the kids will love chasing the wildlife down the dirt tracks (dress your kids for having fun, let them enjoy themselves at the park without worrying about their clothes).

Bike rentals: at the entrance to Jardin d' Acclimatation approx. 11euros each for the day (2010 price) You can easily spend a whole day cycling in this park. Even if you have not ridden a bike in years you will love this (I hadn't ridden a bike in over 20 years). The bicycles are not the best but they work, you can choose your own bike so test the height of the seat and the brakes before you ride away. Tip for handbags: always carry a scarf in your handbag and when you hire a bike with a basket put the handbag straps over the handlebars and cover the bag with your scarf for security.

Jardin d'Acclimatation

Paris map of gardens

stayed tuned for part 2...

We beat the budget!!!

Well as you all may know now that we have been home in Australia for a month now.
I just wanted to let you know that we did beat the budget.
We started with $20,000 (about $5,000 was the airfares to and from Italy). So we had $15,000 for the 3 months in Italy for accomodation, travel, food and other expenses.
We did extremely well and enjoyed everything we could do on a budget. All of our accomodation in apartments was at least 3 star by Australian standards. We treated ourselves to lunches out (when in Paris we ate out most of the time for a week). We also spent about $600 in one day at Paris Disneyland (big budget blowout).
But in saying all of this we came home and still had $500 in the bank.
If you have any questions for me about how we found budget accomodation and great travel deals please feel free to leave a comment or contact me by email to maleenah@gmail.com

I guess I should tell you what our budget is...

Well to start off our budget for 3 months in Italy including all airfares, accomodation, passports, travel insurance, luggage, taxis, transport, souvenirs, food, utilities, international drivers licence and everything else needed for travelling overseas is $20,000.
Most couples spend $20,000 on a 2-4 week tour of Europe so we plan on stretching it to 3 months.
First things first you really need to be flexible on when you can go, so that when you find extremely cheap airfares you can book them. By buying Air Asia tickets when they were having a sale we saved thousands all up our tickets from the Gold Coast to London return were $1100 each including all taxes. From there we paid for cheap local flights with Meridiana, Ryanair and Easy Jet. If you do not want to go as cheap as Air Asia most of the time you can get a flight to London Return from Brisbane from about $1800 + taxes.
So our airfares have taken up a quarter of our budget ( I did freak out at this, but have done my sums over and over again and everything should work out alright).
Next post will be on the accomodation and also whether it was a good idea flying Air Asia :-).