where to stay

When it comes to traveling finding a place to stay is one of the most important things for a lot of people. Budget plays a huge role in this. Hotels are not cheap - especially nice ones. And since we've already established that we were traveling on a budget, we had fewer options.

We first established what part of each city we wanted to stay in, basing it on many things such as; safety, transportation, things we wanted to do/see, and so forth. I really focused on using Airbnb, and if you're not familiar with the site let me explain. Airbnb is a site that people use to rent out their apartments, houses, extra rooms, etc.. to anyone. There are many ways to modify your search such as if you want your own place, or if you're okay with shared space, how many rooms you need, and much more. Most Airbnb hosts post many photos and descriptions of there places with specific rules and things that are included.

One of the great things about Airbnb is most guest rate and talk about their experience and you can see how recent they stayed there. Pricing is based on whatever the host thinks is appropriate, and it even tells you how many times they've hosted. We used Airbnb for all but one of our stays in Europe and most of our stays were around 60 or less a night. All of the hosts were wonderful and left tons of suggestions on where to eat, what to do, advice, etc.. we felt completely safe in every place and were super comfortable - while saving money. Another plus of using Airbnb is that most come with kitchens which helps with saving food from restaurants since a lot of hotels lack fridge/microwaves - and if you want to cook you have the option to do that too. Some of our places even had a washer - which was needed since we were gone for over a month.

While I know it can be nice to have the luxury and familiarity of a hotel, but using Airbnb is really an awesome experience.

Basilica in Florence, Italy.

the next step

Next, in our trip was figuring out what route we were going to take. The first step I took in this process was researching the flights between cities/countries in Europe. Since we had planned to go to many different cities there was a lot of options. I once again used Kayak to research prices of flights. Europe has many budget airlines that range as inexpensive as $20-$50 one way. We also researched train options for the cities that were a little bit closer together.

We took flights from London to Rome, Rome to Santorini, Santorini back to Rome, where we then caught a train to Naples. Italy has an amazing rail system where you can pretty much travel throughout the country by train for a very low cost. The trains leave at all times of the day and the travel times are very quick because of the trains at high speeds. We were able to purchase the tickets online before, but you are able to buy them there at the train stations. We purchased all of our Italy train tickets on the Italia Rail website. After traveling through Italy we planned to take a flight from Venice which was our final stop in Italy to Amsterdam.

One of the websites that I found that was so very useful to me was Seat 61. He goes into detail on routes you can take between cities and which is most budget and or time effective. You can even put your specific destinations on the website and it gives you advice. It's basically a step by step guide on how to buy and where. We continued our trip with a train ride from Amsterdam to Paris, a flight from Paris to Barcelona and finished it off with a train ride to Madrid before flying home.

The process of booking all these flights and train tickets can be a little tedious, but from experience, I liked booking them beforehand so we didn't have to worry about getting to where we wanted to be when we wanted to be there. Of course, if you're more of the spontaneous traveler and want to just go day by day then all these are available for purchase day of, depending on availability of course.

View from top of the Eiffel Tower.

the beginning

Growing up I had always dreamt of traveling to Europe, making it happen seemed tough though. I had traveled a good amount around the US in my early to mid twenties, but I had wanted to see more. I'm not sure what exactly what had me so drawn to Europe, but the thought of exploring somewhere completely different than everything I'd ever seen was so exciting. Which is why I finally decided to take the leap across the pond in 2016. I had taken some time off school and was just working as a bartender. My boyfriend and I started planning our trip to Europe in the beginning of 2016 and we were aiming to leave that September. The hardest part about planning this whole thing? Where to start, really.

First things first - we decided we wanted to get our moneys worth and stat for a month, luckily for us both of our jobs approved it (lots of PTO saved up helped too). Next on the list was the flight. A flight to Europe is usually around $1,000 roundtrip, I spent weeks researching when the best time to leave, where do we fly to first etc. I used Kayak mostly when searching for flights because it allows you to search a multi-city round trip - meaning you fly into one destination and fly home from another but it bundles it like a round trip. I compared the price of buying it separately and this was more economical, which for us was a big deal because we were ballin' on a budget. Another helpful app when searching for flights is Hopper. Hopper helps monitor flight prices and tells you when the best time to buy is. If your dates are flexible it shows you a calendar view of the months you're thinking about going and it shows the difference in prices per day. It sends you helpful notifications like "this is a good price, but we expect the price to drop in the next week - so wait to buy" or things like "this is the lowest price you will get, buy now!"

We ended up deciding to fly into one of London's five airports and start out there and fly home from Madrid where we were ending the trip. It made the most sense geographically for all the places we were planning to visit (I'll get to that later). We ended up purchasing our flight in April so about five months before we would be leaving, the flight was about $1,100 dollar round trip each and they were both direct flights with no layovers. Having no layovers was a big thing for us, we didn't want to waste time waiting at an airport for another flight when we could be out exploring - and the fear of our bags being left at a connecting airport.

From April on we began to plan our route and our destinations in-between London and Madrid. We were spending 33 days total in Europe dividing the days up between so many options wasn't easy. We went back and forth on our destinations for weeks, and we finally settled on Italy (Rome, Naples, Florence, and Venice), Santorini, Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona before ending in Madrid. We didn't want to waste time back tracking. There were so many more places we wanted to go, but we didn't want to waste more of our days getting to destinations and not being able to experience the cities we had chosen. We spent anywhere from two to five days in each city, we tried to divide the time up the best we could basing it on what we wanted to see.

This is just the beginning, we haven't even boarded the plane yet.