By Sustainability Research Fellow Katie Koenig
Traveling alone is a daunting task, made even harder when in a completely different country that speaks a different primary language than you. Help from Castle staff and buddying up with peers makes it easier, but there are innumerable considerations to take into account, and adding sustainable methods of travel on top of that seems almost impossible from the outset.
However, none of that is quite as difficult as it seems. Planning in advance, making and keeping to a budget, and doing research into destinations all greatly ease the burden of traveling. A few weeks before midterms, a few friends and I decided to travel together to Brussels. It was farther than the daytrips I had taken before, but was still easily reached, and had a wide range of activities I wanted to do—from museums, both for class and for myself, to restaurants and open-air markets. We had a fun futuristic Japanese style hotel with an onsen, bar, and restaurant with box beds and a view. The question was how we would get there.
‘Sustainable’ Flight
Honestly, there’s really no way to fly sustainably with the technology and services currently available in the aviation industry. If you take a flight, you’ll have a large carbon footprint, and that’s that. There are ways to reduce your environmental impact if you need to fly, but the most sustainable option is to avoid planes. Buses and trains are not only more likely to use green energy as fuel than planes, but they also require much less fuel than a plane to travel long distances. Traveling nearby allows you to be more sustainable than going far away, and it provides the opportunity to become more familiar with the location where you already live. Chances are, there is some destination reachable by bus or train that you never realized would be as entertaining and valuable as it ends up being.
For planes, the most fuel intensive action is take off and landing. Direct flights, especially for long ones, will end up using less fuel than the total required for a trip with one or more layovers. Plus, it’s more convenient, comfortable, and overall pleasant to fly direct. Although the cost of a direct flight tends to be a little more than one with a layover, I value the convenience of it more than the additional cost, especially for my six hour flights from home to Boston at the starts and ends of semesters. I tend to be more prudent with spending in other aspects—food, entertainment, and such—to make up for the difference.
Another way to reduce your emissions per flight is to fly economy and take large planes. The principle behind both aspects is the same: the more people there are on one flight, the less fuel is required overall to get them all to their destination. With economy seating, more passengers flying economy fit into a section of a plane than the same size section housing first or business class passengers. Although it’s more a luxurious form of flying, non-economy seating produces more emissions per person than economy. It’s the same with small versus large planes. Plus, non-economy seats are always out of my preferred budget range, and probably will continue to be even after I graduate.
The easiest way to achieve all of these aspects is to use booking websites that label flights that are the most sustainable option based on factors like what I’ve already described. Of course, sometimes outside factors result in having little flexibility with the type of flight you end up booking, like budget or time constraints, so it’s important to be conscious of the carbon footprint your travel brings and attempt to reduce it more in other ways.
Brussels and Eurail
One of the three people I traveled with to Brussels is a big train person. His reasoning: a better view along the way, less chance of getting stranded, and less stress than flying. Considering one of my friends back home is blackmailing me into sending her pictures of all the cows I can find, I was convinced almost immediately. The two of us bought Eurail passes to prep for this trip. We got the pass that provides fifteen days of covered travel over the span of two months with the thought of using it for future trips, too. Doing the math, it averaged out to about thirty dollars per travel day, and we could take any of the multitude of European travel lines (both bus and train) at any time, price, or location with one travel day from that pass.
My other two travel buddies didn’t get Eurail passes, but despite the slight increase in price, it was still feasible for them to get tickets along the way. Occasionally, they bought online tickets through 9292, which I described in the first Kasteel Well post. The Eurail pass made it infinitely easier, however. There are a few trains I plan to take this semester that require a seat reservation fee along with a travel day, but it’s still cheaper with the pass. Plus, it’s easy to add a certain ticket to my app, and only requires a minute or two to process.
The actual train experience was great. Although there was a bed bug outbreak across Northern Europe last month, centered in London and Paris, we didn’t see any on the train (which we were warned about), and we made it onto all the trains we needed. On the way back, though, the train we wanted to take out of Brussels was delayed so much we thought it was canceled, and we had to split up when it came while one person was in the bathroom, but the other two had work they needed to do back at the castle.
Brussels itself is amazing. There are more open markets, pop-up stalls, and vintage stores than I could shake a stick at, and I was thriving. A quick highlights reel of my favorite parts includes the Magritte museum with quotes on every wall, a small waffle place that had the nicest (and newest, including the novice fumbling) server who put up with me and a friend’s poor French (we wanted to practice!), one of many chocolatier places that sold thin sheets of Earl Gray chocolate, and the random ferris wheel by the river that I didn’t go on.
Food was plentiful and everywhere, it was a pretty different atmosphere from anywhere in the Netherlands, and had amazing nightlife and museums and green spaces everywhere. I wasn’t disappointed at all, despite my expectations, that I had put off my much anticipated trip to Paris that I have only recently figured out accommodations for—which is a wild situation where a friend of a friend of a friend is putting me up in Middle-of-Nowhere, Coastal Town, France.
Even as I felt like I was missing out, what with the number of people who had already gone so far away as London and Edinburgh, my short travel time was both a boon for my severe motion sickness and gave me more time to explore the gorgeous city of Brussels.