planning European adventures – 5 helpful tips!

planning European adventures

My wonderful husband and I are getting pretty good at planning European adventures!  We are currently planning our 3rd and we leave in a little over a week! Oh my!! I am getting so excited! We have been blessed enough to go on some incredible trips together in our almost 3 years of being married! For our honeymoon we took an Alaskan cruise, which was amazing! Alaska is breathtaking. It’s unlike any place I have ever seen. The following two years we took the most amazing European adventure trips! We have learned a lot about planning international trips in the process, which I will share in a minute!

Our first Euro-adventure we spent 5 weeks visiting 8 countries!  We explored France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Holland, and Belgium! It was a bit insane and felt like a mad dash! We couldn’t help ourselves though – we were SO excited! Neither of us had been to Europe before and we just couldn’t stop once we started planning!

Last year we spent two weeks in Normandy, Paris, and Istanbul! What an adventure that was! I talked everyone into going to Paris again since I had fallen in love during our visit the year before! It was just as amazing as the first time! Istanbul was also quite incredible. It was very different, but amazing in its own way and the food… OH MY!!!

This time we are planning on traveling for 22 days and will be visiting Scotland, England, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Iceland! We have never been to any of these places and we are busting at the seams with excitement! To read more about how this adventure came about, CLICK HERE! It’s been awesome meeting for coffee to work out the details of the trip! Last week we planned out when we will be where and this week we will be purchasing train/plane tickets and booking lodging!

Planning that first trip was super intimidating and a bit overwhelming! We had no idea where to start and it seemed like this giant mountain we needed to climb. However, after we started it got a little easier. You have to start somewhere! Below is a list of things that I have found to be helpful starting points. There are many more tips on this subject, but for now here are five that I think are important!

Tips when planning European adventure:

  1. READ the guidebooks – We love going to the bookstore, grabbing arm fulls of travel books, a coffee, and sitting down for hours going through them. They are packed full of incredibly helpful information. I am a sucker for the books with tons of pictures (go figure) and my hubby loves reading all of the information and history in the books. It works out nicely! Some of our favorites are Rick Steves, Lonely Planet, and the Eyewitness Travel Guides. These are a great place to start to see where you want to go and what you want to do! They have super helpful tips on practical things as well like lodging, eating, safety, and so on…
  2. Be organized – This really helps me to feel like things are in order so that when it comes time to leave for the trip, there is no stress! I like to make an itinerary of where we plan to be on what days (of course this changes many times through the planning process). This makes it easy when contacting lodging places and looking up train/plane tickets to other destinations. It’s also helpful if you are wanting to keep track of what you are spending and how much everything is costing. Once everything was booked I printed out the confirmation emails of our flight information, lodging details, directions, train times, and any other important information that we might need and packed them safely in my bag. You never know if/when you’ll have internet – so it’s nice to have this all out of the way before you leave so that you don’t have to worry about any of it on your adventure!
  3. Do your research – Don’t just book the first hotel you find, even if it’s an amazing deal. Keep it bookmarked if you loved it, but look around so that you can find the best deal for your money. Sometimes the cheapest isn’t always the best. However, this value is measured differently by everyone. Which is totally cool! You just have to know what you need/want before looking, find a few options, and request information. For us, we love staying at Bed & Breakfasts and guesthouses. They offer an intimate and local experience that a hostel/hotel often does not. Plus you usually get an amazing breakfast full of local cuisine! Also, we found in comparing prices that oftentimes we could find B&B’s for the same price as a hostels private room. Now, if you are simply wanting a place to lay your head at night and don’t mind sharing a room with 5/10 other people, then be sure to check out the youth hostels mixed dorms. We booked a few hostels private rooms on our trip and we loved them all. Hostelworld is an awesome resource for this! Easy Hotel is also a great resource if you’re looking for very basic lodging for a low rate! We stayed at one of these in Berlin and it was exactly like it sounded, but very nice and clean!
  4. Take a train or two – I had never been on a train before and this was one of the things I was looking forward to most on our first trip! We were nervous at first about getting around in the train stations in foreign countries, but it was rather simple. Since we planned to visit so many countries we decided to get a Eurail pass. It was amazing! We got a 21 days pass for each of us that allowed us to take as many trains as we wanted as often as we liked. We didn’t need to purchase tickets before hand or anything. It was great! Especially if we missed a certain train we wanted to take – we just waited for the next one. They have many different options for passes – certain number of countries and a variety of days to pick from. It may not make sense for everyone, but it worked for us on that trip! It is important to know that sometimes on the more popular trains you might need to get a reservation before hand – you can find this information out at the train station. I LOVED our train rides! They were the relaxing time in our chaotic sprint to explore Europe.
  5. Visit the markets – This is a tip for once you’re there! It’s easy to spend a ton of money at restaurants, especially the ones in tourist areas! We will have a few meals at nicer places, but try to stick to markets, bakeries, and restaurants that are off the beaten path. The markets in Europe are amazing! They are small and unique and offer a variety of snack / meal options on the go. This is also a great place to buy bottled water! Water can be very expensive when ordering it and it usually comes in very small portions. We would stock up at the market and keep them in our hotel rooms. Be sure to not over do it though because restrooms aren’t easy to come by and they usually charge you to use them. We were always on the lookout for McDonalds when we needed a restroom- In most of the ones we visited when you paid to use the toilets you could use that ‘credit’ towards buying something. We would usually buy water or a small snack if we were starving.

I hope this helped some if you will be planning European adventures! If you’re not, you should be!! Wandering this beautiful world is such a joy!

“Not all who wander are lost.” JRR Tolkien

 

planning European adventures 2

I am pretty smitten with Paris! I would have to say it is my favorite place we have visited! I am so excited to be going there in the fall!!! More about that later!

Do you have any additional tips that you have found helpful when planning an international trip?? Leave them in the comments!!

 

 

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