Sue & Barb's Excellent Adventure
Top 3 tips for traveling overseas this summer
You know me. You know I researched (extensively!) what we would need to ensure a great trip as we prepared to travel to France this summer. While the memories are still fresh, here are the top three tech things we did — all for the first time — during our recent travels:
I got a European SIM card
This allowed me to have a phone number I could leave for callbacks with restaurants, drivers, hotels or, well, anybody without paying $10 a day for the international rate from my carrier. Now granted, the card was not a snap to set up. But once I got it activated and working, it was fabulous.
Sue figures out how to install her Orange SIM card in France.
I bought mine ahead of time on Amazon but you can buy it after you land as well. Mine was an “Orange Holiday Europe” SIM card and I noticed an Orange kiosk in the airport in France when we landed.
You just crack it open and there is a tiny SIM card. You need to take your current SIM card out (and CAREFULLY put it somewhere safe!) and pop in the new one. You will have to translate some of the directions, and some of it can be difficult, but follow the instructions to the letter and it is doable.
I opted for much more data than I needed, (planning to shoot and share lots of photos, etc.) but at $47 it was still so much cheaper than the daily international rate. And if your travel will not require the kind of data or phone use we wanted, you may not need it at all since WiFi is everywhere — in the cafes, hotels, museums, trains and the subways.
We told everyone before we left to use WhatsApp as the best way to reach us, and it was. Everyone in Europe uses it, and it is marvelously simple and FREE. Just install it on your phone and you can use it to text or call other WhatsApp’ers. WhatsApp uses WiFi for phone calls. It’s fantastic. (So tell your friends to get the app before you go!)
I joined two French Facebook groups
We wanted to drive through the lavender fields in the South of France, and they are not as easy to find as you might think! Joining a group specifically about this area provided us with detailed lat/long directions to the actual fields and were instrumental in making getting to these areas easy and fun. People were so kind and helpful in these groups, sharing what we needed to know about trains, cars, rentals and all manner of questions. This was also another reason I got the SIM card, so I would have Internet in our car for directions.
Just search on Facebook groups for the locales you are visiting and if you see one you like, join up!