Four Week Europe Vacation from Athens to Istanbul.

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I use dollars for the year I research costs and then convert those dollars into Myrfti units. A Myrfti is a sort of inflation-adjusted price. If you have 100 Myrfti, you have 1% of the median year-round full-time American worker's wage/salary. So, if the median year-round full-time American worker earns $50,000, a Myrfti is equal to $5, and 100 Myrfti are $500.

The dollar prices will soon be out-of-date, but the Myrfti prices should be close to what you would pay in any year. Just find the most recent median full-time year-round income for American workers, and divide that by 10,000 to find what 1 Myrfti is worth. Then, once you have that figure, multiply it times the Myrfti costs to get an estimate for the current dollar price of the trip.

There are different ways to find the year-round full-time income used to calculate the Myrfti. One way is to take median weekly wages and multiply by 52. Using this method, in 2011 the median year-round full-time income was $39,312 (this comes from Highlights of Women's Earnings in 2011[pdf] from the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, report 1038 issued in October of 2012. Specifically, I looked at Table 1 Median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers, where the median weekly earnings for both sexes, total, 16 years and older is reported as $756. I have multiplied that median weekly earning by 52 to reach an estimate for the year-round worker

But some percentage of full-time workers who are surveyed to calculate the median weekly full-time wage are not year-round workers. Once you understand that a significant percentage of full-time workers at any given week are going to have some unemployment experience, or might retire, or might be in seasonal employment so that they take some time off without income, then you realize that the weekly median full-time wage is going to underestimate the annual year-round full-time income.

What is the median year-round full-time worker’s actual wage? In one government document I found that in 2010 the median year round full-time male worker earned $47,715. I have also read elsewhere that in 2011 the median year-round worker earned about $49,500, which implies that the median year-round male worker must have earned significantly more, perhaps $54,000 or so.

Those 2010 and 2011 numbers can’t both be right, because wages didn’t grow that strongly between 2010 and 2011. It’s not plausible that men who had year-round full-time employment got raises of about 14% between 2010 and 2011. For many of these Myrfti calculations I researched between 2009-2011 I use $49,500 as my Myrfti figure for median year-round full-time workers, but that number is probably too high. In some other trips I used $40,000 as the Myrfti figure, but that is probably too low. At any rate, these numbers are only off by a few percentage points.

This is one of a series of approximately month-long tours of Europe I’ve planned. The cost of getting over to Europe is so high, that it is worthwhile to save up and spend significant time (2 to 4 weeks, ideally) over there. There are three approaches to visiting Europe for a two-week to a four-week major vacation. First, you can try to see as many places as possible, to get a variety of experiences and see a variety of places. Doing this, you should try to have two or three nights in each place, and keep the single nights in one place to a minimum. Second, you can pick three places to see and know well, and spend 5-10 days in each of those three places. You would probably pick a couple major cities and a smaller city or town, and see if you could get a discounted weekly rate, or some sort of a discount for staying there for an extended stay. Using these three places as your home bases, you would take day-trips to areas of interest within an hour or two of each of your bases. The third approach is to do a home exchange or stay for your entire visit in one place. You can save money by doing this sort of month rental as opposed to staying a variety of hotels. By staying in one place as your home base, you can get a deeper understanding of one place, perhaps make some friendships, and even perhaps take an intensive language study course for a couple weeks.

I have done all three sorts of visits, and each approach has its advantages. I probably prefer the longer stay in one single place, but I have no objections to a long trek all over the continent.

Car rental and rail travel each have their advantages. I would typically mix the two, using trains for a few long-haul or overnight trips, or for some short day-trips from a base, and using cars for medium-distances or exploring areas away from the rail networks. I also like a mix of visits to areas of natural beauty for hikes, stops in small towns and villages in rural settings, and stays in larger cities with all their cultural attractions. The major European cities such as Berlin, London, Paris, Barcelona, and so forth are each worthy of at least a week or more for a satisfying visit.