My want to go to Europe only intensified after college. I told myself that one day we would go and it would be a great big adventure. So I kept dreaming of that "someday."
When I reminded him again of my dream to travel to Europe, he told me to plan it. Actually, he told me that several times before I actually did start planning. But what I wanted was for him to help me. I quickly realized that he truly didn't care about where we went. He was letting me take the reigns on this vacation planning.
In January of this year, I finally started planning. I wasn't sure where to start, so one night, we ended up at Barnes & Noble. I headed over to their travel section and started pulling books off the shelf. I wasn't sure where we wanted to go or what we wanted to see. I just pulled several destinations. We didn't end up purchasing any of the books that evening, because we could get them cheaper on Amazon and we didn't have a set itinerary yet. But it was good to see them in person and put my hands on them.
When we got home, I also remembered about this little thing on the internet called Pinterest. Ha! Honestly, the only thing I've really ever used Pinterest for is for recipes and crafts. It wasn't around when I was planning my wedding, and I've never really used it in depth. But y'all...there's a wealth of information out there! I started creating one huge board dedicated to Europe but since then had to break it out into countries.
Somehow we narrowed down the countries we wanted to visit. Originally, I told Tyler that we needed to save London for a vacation all on its own. However, we found really cheap flights* in and out of London, so we purchased them. I knew that Venice and Paris would have to be on the itinerary, so I thought that Switzerland would be a great connecting country.
*We signed up for Scott's Cheap Flights Premium so that someone else could do the flight searching for us. They send out emails frequently when they find good deals. I'm a customer for life! They do a great job and find some amazing steals!
Once we had our countries set and we got the travel books ordered, I got to work. I started doing lots of research. I asked my social media friends questions. I read the books. I pinned a million things on Pinterest. I wanted to know all I could know.
Please note: Yes, I am a nerd. I like to know the history of things before I see them. I want to know why something is important. I'm pretty good with my American history, but not so great with the history of other countries.
Our final itinerary ended up looking like this:
3 days in London
4 days in Paris
4 days in Switzerland
1 1/2 days in Venice
1 day in London
These are the books we ordered:
Rick Steves Switzerland Eighth Edition (the 9th Edition is out currently)
I started a little travel notebook that would be easy to carry with me in my purse. After reading the travel guides, I wrote out the important information: the things we wanted to see, the hours they were open, how much it cost to get in, and so forth. This proved to be very helpful in planning our actual itinerary.
This allowed me to see the options for what we could see and figure out what would be a priority. I'm such a pen-and-paper type of girl that this was super helpful. It also was where I wrote down suggestions of restaurants and tips from the travel group. Yes, you could probably say that my planning was a little excessive. That's okay...this was my bucket list trip. I wanted to make the most of it.
Over the next few days, I'll share all my tips from only taking backpacks, to our favorite sights, to what we didn't like. I hope you'll join me as I recap our incredible adventure.
Other Posts in this Series:
London #1
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