Exploring Europe - I Left My Heart in Paris
On this day last year Mom and I were in London. It was the greatest trip and when we got back home people kept asking me “How was Europe?”. What could I say? How can you sum up three of the best weeks of your life? It was amazing just doesn’t seem big enough.
Three and a half weeks of traveling, eating, meeting new people and generally just doing whatever we wanted to do.
Mom and I have traveled many times just the two of us. She is a great travel partner. She is easygoing like me and doesn’t stress too much. It helps that I’m usually decently organized so she doesn’t have much to stress over. I had the idea to go to Europe sometime around my 30th birthday. I knew it was going to be a big trip as I didn’t want to go all the way to Europe for just a few days. I started putting together a plan.
PLANNING -
Dates & Countries:
When I began I was a little ambitious. I had us going to 15 countries in the same 3.5 weeks that we ended up visiting 9. It didn’t take me long to realize that it was too much to travel all over the continent including Greece. I had a spreadsheet of how long we would stay in each country. Mind you, we hadn’t actually chosen dates yet.
Choosing the dates was probably the easiest thing. I was working in a resort town with very clear off-season periods. I took those dates and looked at flights in May 2017. We used WOW Airlines and found a great deal on flights into Stockholm, Sweden and return tickets from London, England. I purchased the tickets the same day!
Now that we had the dates the where was the most important question. I started with a spreadsheet. You’d be surprised how often a solution to my problems involve a spreadsheet! I listed the dates that we would be gone from home including travel dates. I printed a map of the countries of Europe and I got started!
We had decided to fly into Stockholm, Sweden and fly back home from London, England. We knew that we wanted to visit multiple countries in that time. As I mentioned earlier, my first draft of this schedule was quite ambitious. Mom and I mutually agreed that it was a bit much. Just the amount of traveling to the different countries would have left us permanently tired. I knew I wanted to be in Paris for my birthday, November 2, so we planned around that.
Budgeting:
I should probably mention here that we are in no way millionaires. Mom is a nurse as she has been for 27 years and I work in hospitality management. At the time of this trip I was fortunate enough to be working somewhere that I lived on property rent free. This of course freed up some income to be able to take on this large of a trip.
We knew our biggest expenses were going to be transportation and lodging. We had already bought out tickets to and from Europe which in total were around $1,800. The other big transportation cost was our Rail Europe tickets. We purchased the Eurail Global Pass for just over $1,200. This included travel anywhere within 15 days. I did quite a bit of research and found that for the amount of traveling that we would be doing it would be the best option.
*I want to say here that there are absolutely cheaper options with both the plane and train tickets. Mom and I are both a little picky when it comes to traveling. I am six feet tall so we went with the more expensive plane seats for extra legroom. We also picked out seats on the trains which cost a little more because I didn’t think I would do well sitting backward (please see above comment regarding terrible terrible motion sickness).
For lodging we went back and forth on our budget. We had decided on a budget of an average of $75 per night. When I dug in to the actually booking of rooms it became evident that this would need to be higher. We did find some great places at or below the $75 budget, but we found some cities that this was impossible. We settled on an average budget of $90. Some cities were quite a bit higher than this and some much lower.
Cities & Transportation:
We’d picked out the countries that we wanted to visit. Now it was time to narrow down the cities. Rail Europe really helped with that. We had decided that we wanted to use trains for our main transportation between cities and countries. The are multiple websites that will allow you to plan your trip (www.raileurope.com and www.eurail.com to name a couple). I decided to use Rail Europe. They have a map feature that you can actually select the cities you want to visit and they will tell you how far away other major cities are. Knowing Mom and myself I didn’t think we would want to be on a train for more than a few hours at a time. Have I told you about my habitual motion sickness?
After hours spent deciding we at last had our final city plan!! Now it was time to truly plan this trip! What did we want to see in each city? Where would we stay? How would we get around once there?
What did we want to see?
This was another super fun part of the planning! I used Google, Pinterest, Trip Advisor, Expedia, and any other random website that I could find for ideas. Some of things I knew of course: see Eiffel Tower in Paris and Big Ben in London.
Where would we stay?
We had decided that our budget for lodging was an average of $90 per night. Not the cheapest but not the luxury that Mom, the snob of hotels, was used to. Don’t worry, Mom is a self described hotel snob. Nothing too revealing about this, but with that being said we also weren’t looking for $20 a night hostels either. I absolutely enjoyed this part of the planning. Did I look at $900 a night hotels just to dream? You bet I did! Eventually I had to crack down and actually look in our budget. I used two main websites for this: Airbnb.com and Hotels.com.
Airbnb.com - My favorite lodgings on this trip were from Airbnb. How can you better learn about the people, culture and history of an area than to stay with someone who lives there? When you do a search on Airbnb you can get seriously specific about what you are looking for. Mom and I don’t have a problem sharing a bed when it’s necessary, but I think I can say we’d rather have our own. You can also save your search in case you can’t find what you’re looking for and need to revisit. We found with Airbnb that you have to pay in full when booking your stay. We decided that this was the main way we wanted to find lodging while in Europe, but when we couldn’t find what we were looking for we went with Hotels.com.
Hotels.com - We have been Hotels.com users for years. They have a good percentage of hotels on their site with great prices and they have a great reward program as well. I love the map view on Hotels.com as well. If you have an area of the city that you are wanting as your home base it’s so much easier to do it on map view. Hotels.com also has deals with a lot of hotels on it’s site that you can book now and pay later. This is great if you aren’t able to pay for all of your hotels up front.
How would we get around:
This was a big question! We knew we would be doing quite a bit of walking, but how far were we willing to walk?
Do as the local do! We figured out the metros! In each and every city. I’m going to brag on myself here for a minute. I have never been lost. Never! I have a great sense of direction and always have. I’d like to think that this was a major factor in how we got around from day to day. It helped that I also downloaded all possible apps to my phone that I would need for this and most of the metro stations had an option to view the maps in English. I also made sure to have Google Translate downloaded for offline viewing.
In multiple cities we found the use of tourist busses helpful. They take you to all of the big spots that are probably on your list, most of them have audio describing the city, and you can get on and off as much as you want. That last part is important: find a bus you can get on and off repeatedly. While in Paris, we purchased tickets to the City Sightseeing bus for three days. There was a pick up stop a quarter mile away from where we were staying. We would just hop on and travel until we found an area that we wanted to explore for a while!
Organization:
I mentioned earlier in this post that mom didn’t need to be stressed because of my overall organization in planning. I was extremely organized on this trip as well. I put together two folders with all of the possible information we would need on this trip including the following:
Full schedule
Flight itineraries
Copies of Eurail tickets
All hotel/airbnb itineraries
City itineraries
Country information
Copies of our passports
Copies of our travel insurance
Copies of our insurance cards
Tickets to pre-purchased entertainment
Google map directions to all lodging from rail stations
City Itineraries - I created a spreadsheet to have the information for each city. This included all of my stats for that city like average temperature of when we’d be there and the local currency. These pages also have all of the traveling information, lodging, and what our sightseeing plans were.
Pre-purchased Entertainment - For the things we knew we were going to do I purchased tickets beforehand. I purchased tickets to see The Phantom of the Opera in London and dinner at the Eiffel Tower for my birthday before I even left Colorado.
Country Information - I found these traveling pages for each country that we were going to. They had common words and phrases on them that we practiced as well as different customs (tipping, table manners and foods to try.
One of these folders was left with Jennifer at home in Texas and the other came with us. Some of this might be considered over-cautious, but what does it hurt to be overly prepared for any incident?
Packing:
Let’s talk about the stress of packing. I don’t enjoy packing for an overnight trip two hours away. Do I need to bring 6 shirts just in case I forget how to eat and drink? What if I spill something on each and every article of clothing? Now let’s take that anxiety and apply it to an almost our week long trip! With out plane tickets, Mom and I were able to have a full size suitcase, a carry on, and a personal item. That sounds great, but did we want to lug that much around Europe? The answer is no we did not!
Our goal was one suite case and one personal item each. I created a checklist for what we needed to bring. From clothes to accessories to first aid to laundry. You can view and download my checklist here.
THE TRIP -
Home to Washington, DC:
At the time of this trip, Mom was living in Texas and me a small mountain town in Colorado. Instead of meeting in Washington D.C., I went to Dallas two days early. This turned out to be a great decision. We were able to check all of our packing together and go shopping for small last minute items. We then flew to Washington D.C *. together. We had a 8 hours between that flight and the next so we decided to play tourist in our country’s capital for a while.
*I’m going to tell you a quick story about how I made a huge mistake before this trip really even began. Probably one of the biggest mistakes a person can make on a trip like this. We left for the Dallas airport at 5:00 a.m. on our first day. We took and Uber to the airport because we didn’t want Jennifer to have to wake Winter up that early. Security wasn’t too bad, not that we noticed. We were going to Europe!! For three weeks! As we are sitting right outside of security putting our shoes back on something in the back of my mind tells me to look through my travel wallet one more time to just make sure I have everything. I don’t know what this “something” was, but I really wish it had hit me an hour earlier! I left my debit card back at the house! I couldn’t have! It had to be somewhere else! It was…the house. This was the main card that Mom and I had our money in. The main card that we had decided to use for the majority of all expenses. The card that was already linked to many of our lodgings. The card that we had already called the bank to tell them where we would be! And…there wasn’t enough time to go back to the house to get it or to have Jennifer race it to us. We would have to figure something else out. Although she never said it because God knows I felt terrible enough, I think Mom lost a little faith in my leading this trip at that moment. We can laugh about it now of course, but at the time I was in shock. We did have other cards on us and were able to transfer money around. We also purchased things like our tour buses online which allowed us to use that card that was back at home. In the end it turned out okay. Please. Remember. Your. Money!
After checking out the White House and the Washington Monument we made our way back to the airport to truly start our trip!
Reykjavik, Iceland:
I hadn’t realized before this trip how incredibly terrible both Mom and I are at functioning when we are extremely tired. We made it to Reykjavik in what was our middle of the night. A quick trip through their customs and we were back to the gate to wait on our next flight.
Stockholm, Sweden:
Let’s be honest here: even before we boarded our first plane on this trip we knew we were going to be tired when we got to Stockholm. After we got of the plane, got our luggage, and took the train into the city we decided to take a taxi to our first hotel. The first thing on our list? Just a tiny little nap :). After that we hit the streets. We hit the streets closer to our hotel that is. It was already late so we found dinner and looked around a bit. In Stockholm we walked up to the Royal Palace right as they were doing the changing of the guard. It was just luck that we showed up when we did as we had just come from exploring the Gamla Stan area. From there we went to one the Vasa Museum. This had been one of the highest places on my list. Literally this is an entire ship inside of a museum. Not a boat, but a huge warship (or it would have been had it not sunk before it made it out of Stockholm)! We found the Mall of Scandinavia that night and had an amazing meal of Swedish meatballs, of course.
Copenhagen, Denmark:
Our first view of Denmark was seeing the vast sea of windmills from the train. I say sea because they were in fact in the water. We traveled mostly in the morning by train. We figured if we got to the new city early that was a whole day of exploring we could do. Copenhagen was the only city that we got to late. This was due mainly to how long the ride was from Stockholm. We arrived in the heart of Copenhagen and made our way to our first Airbnb. Random thought here: suitcases vs cobblesstones stinks! Our first host was a beautiful couple that owned a fourth floor flat with an extra room that they rented. They had great recommendations for food and entertainment in the area and were very sweet. While enjoying a full breakfast the next morning we decided to take the sightseeing bus around town. We made our way back to the heart of the city and walked around for a while before meeting up with the bus. We saw so many amazing sights in Denmark from old churches to castles to old navy barraks to The Little Mermaid. We made our way around jumping on and off our bus.
Hamburg, Germany:
If I left my hear in Paris like the title reads it’s only because I first found it in Germany! I hadn’t looked into the ride from Copenhagen to Germany to see that it partially takes place on a ferry. A huge ferry! The entire train we were on just drove right onto this boat! We met a friendly girl on the boat that recommended a few places to visit while in Hamburg. After figuring out my third metro system I was feeling like a pro as we made our way to another Airbnb. Our host here was a nice man named Rainer. He has a beautiful third floor flat that I would like to go back and live in. On our first morning in Hamburg we decided to get up early to watch the sunrise over the Outer Alster Lake. We walked around the city as well as riding a bus and visited many areas. The Town Hall Square was beautiful! The attention to detail in all of the architecture was so amazing I just wanted to sit there and stare at it for a while.
If you ask Mom, Hamburg was her favorite part of this journey. The second we stepped off the train she started talking about how “at home” she felt. I was truly sensational! Part of it I believe was due to our amazing accommodations with our host that got Mom out of her shell a bit. Late night chat in the kitchen with bottles of liquor bought in the South of France will do that I believe.
Amsterdam, Netherlands:
Amsterdam is expensive! I don’t want saying that to make you think it’s not worth it though. It was worth it, but we stayed a little out of the city in Zwanenburg. This turned out to be a blessing though as it put us about half way between Amsterdam and Haarlem. We were extremely happy about this on the first day when we decided to walk around Haarlem and found a good old fashion windmill!
I had the BEST brownie I have ever had in my life at a little cafe in Amsterdam! These are the times that I wish you could get receipts from restaurants. Like I’m not going to resell it or anything. I just want batches and batches of those brownies for myself. As a part of our tour we were able to visit a diamond dealer that had a class on how diamonds are cut and ranked. We also visited and ate lunch at the Rijks Museum. I even made Mom take a picture with Van Gogh! I was able to get us out of Amsterdam early enough to visit Zandvoort. Mom has always loved the water more than anything so I figured her getting to see the North Sea. We had a great time walking along the beach and even went to a restaurant right there. This restaurant ,Thalassa, ended up being one of our very favorite places we ate on this entire trip! We even learned how people eat a whole fish (we had never) by watching the lady next to us use her fork and knife as surgery tools!
Brussels, Belgium:
What does one do when they only have 24 hours in Brussels? One takes a chocolate tour and gets a waffle of course! We stayed at a hotel right outside of the Grand Place with a view. The chocolate walking tour was amazing. Not only did we visit multiple chocolatiers but we also saw a bit of Brussels as we were going along. I even got Mom to admit that dark chocolate does have a place in the world!
Luxembourg City, Luxembourg:
We were able to walk to our Airbnb from the metro in Luxembourg as well as all over the small city. We saw the Palace of the Grand Duke and all of the beautiful buildings. I’m not going to lie...we had been traveling now for almost two weeks straight and we were tired. Do I feel back that we rested quite a bit while in Luxembourg? No, I do not. We rested, read, and even did some laundry and it was great!
Nancy, France:
The morning we were supposed to go to Paris did not exactly go to plan. We got to the train station and found out that our train was delayed. It was so delayed in fact that that we missed our connecting train and had to wait three hours until the next. Luckily we were in this beautiful little French town. Who can complain about that, right? To make it even better we found a cute cafe right across the street with outdoor seating to enjoy the beautiful day!
Paris, France:
J'ai laissé mon coeur à Paris! We ended up getting to Paris later than expected because of the delay. By the time we made it to our hotel it was getting late, but I refused to go to dinner or bed before seeing the Eiffel Tower. When I was deciding where to stay in Paris, my number one must have was close to the Eiffel Tower. Here was this landmark that I have seen in pictures since I was a child. It was dark by the time we got there so the Eiffel Tower was already lit up. We walked there and just stood in awe for some time. For some reason I didn’t expect it to be so large, but I’m so glad it was! We got some great pictures and found some dinner. I knew I wanted to see the sunrise with the Eiffel Tower so we made sure to make that happen! There was a great deal on three days on the sightseeing bus and it worked perfectly. It was like our own taxi! We visited all of the main sites like The Louvre, The Champs Elysees, and the Arc De Triomphe. I got Mom to climb the steps of the Arc De Triomphe and the view from the top was spectacular. We took a nighttime cruise of La Seine and went up the Eiffel Tower to see the view at the top. All of our step counts were high for this entire trip, but Paris was the highest! We went all day long taking everything in. We stopped at small cafes for breakfast and lunch and of course little pâtisseries to load up on sweets! All of the Parisians we met were very friendly and it turns out we knew a few more French words and phrases than we even knew.
We did a last minute decision to change our itinerary before we left Paris. Our original plan had us going to London for a day then Edinburgh for two days then back to London. We decided to stay in London for the rest of our trip. We loved that we had three days in Paris and were able to see so much of it and decided to do the same in London. I’d like to go back and visit Ireland and Scotland one day.
London, England:
I could live here. That was my first thought in London. Although I knew that I wanted my birthday to be special in Paris, I knew that I was going to love London. I definitely was not surprised to be right although the first day it was so cold and rainy that my feet got so wet that I thought I was going to get sick. I was able to warm up and felt much better! Mom and I were lucky enough to be in London when they did a changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. It was quite the event and I’m so glad we were there! Unfortunately we were not there during the months that you can tour Buckingham Palace. We’ll have to go back for that. We spent the next couple of days visiting all that we could in the city. We visited Kings Cross Station so that I could officially declare a house at the 9 3/4 platform. Ravenclaw in case you were wondering! We visited Kensington Palace and saw the Princess Diana exhibit. We also got all dressed up and saw The Phantom of the Opera! It was Mom’s first time seeing a play like this and I was honored to be the one she did it with.
🇺🇸 Back Home :(:
But I don’t wanna! Please don’t make me! I’m pretty sure I said both of these things many many times to Mom before we left London. One, because I really didn’t want to leave the great adventure we had been on. Two, we had to much traveling to do before we were home and I was not looking forward to it. Three flights, two long Uber drives, a loooooong bus ride, and 36 hours later I was home! I didn’t sleep at all the first two days I was home either. It was a weird kind of torture to be back home when I didn’t want to be and also not sleeping so I had plenty of time to think about it.
Thank you for coming along with me as I relived the greatest adventure of my live so far! I cannot believe it’s already been a year! I’d love to hear about your adventures below!
*All opinions in this blog are just that, opinions. I have not been paid to advertise any companies listed.