Europe, Fall 2016: How Not To Plan A Euro Trip

First, a disclaimer: I have a penchant for spontaneous adventures – see Dubai and Abu Dhabi,  Dubrovnik and Tbilisi in 2015 and Hong Kong and Macau earlier this year for recent examples – so this latest jaunt shouldn’t be all that surprising, but what is surprising is that given its bucket-list nature – isn’t a Euro trip something that entails serious preparation? a bit more fuss and hoo-ha?- I approached it in the same casual manner.

So here are my key takeaways from the ‘planning period’:

Tip 1: Don’t buy air tickets because they were on sale and then plan to go after. 

The thought process should be: How about we go to Europe this year? Let’s go to Points A, B, C, and fly in via Point D; and not, as in our case, Oh, look, Point C is on sale, but so is Point B, let’s maybe go to C and then do A and then G and T and Z and then go back to C? No wait, B might be better. B? Okay, B. Yeah, now we’re going to Europe in the fall!

Tip 2: Don’t start thinking about a travel fund only six months out, when you’ve just had a car accident and are moving into your own place which is currently being refurbished and you are paying a team of painters and carpenters, not to mention buying furniture and appliances *gulp*. Long-haul travel needs carefully scheduled financing, the sort that is beyond giving up your usual caramel macchiato at Starbucks.

Also, flying off to another country on a whim three months before The Actual Euro Trip itself is hardly a sensible idea. But, you know, some people are always worth the credit card bills. 😉

Tip 3: Don’t check the weather forecast for only one of the several destinations you visit.

Sixteen degrees for Vienna, ho hum, I can manage that, I said, neglecting to check Cologne and Amsterdam, which turned out to be a few degrees cooler, and Prague – which registered six the day we arrived. Six.

Tip 4: Don’t plan on getting a local SIM card if your phone is -surprise, surprise -locked. Of course I realized this once I was already on the continent, having blithely assumed before that I could just switch to Vodafone or whichever. And I didn’t have an extra phone on me, so what else was there to do but go on roaming.

Which wasn’t such a horrible alternative- my bill wasn’t catastrophic and the connections were excellent.

Tip 5: Do not be so busy that you leave packing until the night before you fly out and are so sleepy that you end up tossing random clothes in without considering any #ootd combinations. Yes, friends, I went to Europe without a wardrobe plan! #fashionfail

Actually, don’t be so busy that you leave other critical activities last-minute – like exchanging money or clearing your fridge and leaving your house and car secure or even getting a basic manicure- which I ultimately ended up not doing.

Adulting means building in enough time pre- and post-trip to ease your transitions out of and back into reality. *sigh*

And my best no-fail tip: Stay organized.

I don’t mean planning your daily itinerary down to the last tour stop (the difference between my boomer mommy’s and my millennial travel styles merits a separate post), I mean a color-coded, hyper-linked Excel worksheet.

We planned our trip ourselves, mostly over email and text, so that worksheet was immensely useful in tracking which train routes we’d decided to take and what flats we were thinking of booking and where we were going to be on which day, and also totting up the running expenses – a handy way of keeping them from swelling into monstrous proportions.

Did we keep them under PHP 50k? Of course not – so I’m not going to write about traveling on a tightly controlled budget because I can’t. Neither will I write about how I saved for this trip, because I didn’t, not reeeally. *facepalm*  But all things considered, I think we managed the spending quite well.

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It was a marvelous holiday anyway. 🙂 More stories to follow!

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PS: I’ve been told I forgot one tip, so I am reproducing it here, hashtags and all:

Tip 6: Do not travel all the way to Europe and circumvent Germany as this is one country that has not only shaped the entire history of Europe, but also happens to be an extraordinarily, surprisingly beautiful country. #ilovethegermansouth #blackforestbeauty 

In my defense, I DID see some of the countryside through the train windows…