The Plot thickens.

Two of our Astro friends have done a lot of travelling with different companies who specialise in astronomical events and occurrences and so their respective views were sought about which company and to which eclipse we should be looking at. Everyone has differing requirements when it comes to foreign travel so we listened to the pros and cons of the different companies and how our friends rated them. There seemed to be one thing that all the companies we heard about had in common, their prices! We normally try to book our holidays ourselves and normally don’t use travel agents or tour companies if we can help it, so with that in mind we looked into organising an eclipse trip independently. Svalbard was picked as a starting point as we really wanted to go there and it was far enough in the future that we thought we had plenty of time. We used the different companies we had heard about as a baseline of the prices for past trips and set about beating them. We realised quite quickly that none of the companies had been to Svalbard for an eclipse so we had to budget for higher costs because of the remote location. First we looked at accommodation in Longyearbyen; "Holy Mary Mother of God" is the sanitised version of what I first thought of the prices of £190.00 a night. Next up was flights and it was not to be an easy ride as they say. Newcastle to Schiphol, Schiphol to Oslo then Oslo to Longyearbyen, with it being so far into the future getting sensible prices and schedules proved very, very difficult if not impossible. The prices we found were interesting to say the least, a new professional camera each with change is the best way I can describe the costs. Also each leg of the journey meant a considerable wait before the onward connection, so more hotels were looked at, meaning new professional lenses could have been purchased at the cost of these places!

Time for a different tack.