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.