Europe 2013

During the stressful parts of PA school, I would dream about "real life" when I was done.  Steve and I talked and dreamed of where we wanted to go, what we wanted to see, adventures we wanted to have.  We knew that if we wanted to travel, it would have to be a priority.  We knew that one of the things we wanted to do when I was done with school was travel.  We are so lucky to live in a "vacation" state, so oftentimes our weekend consists of activities that people have to take time off of work and spend money to go and do - but we wanted to get out of our comfort zones and go where we had never been before.

After lots of long conversations and research on my part, we set our itinerary and bought our plane tickets.  I had read several (ok, more than that!) travel blogs that discussed budgeting for travel.  The first step is to always buy your plane tickets, since then you are committed.  Our tickets had us arriving in one country and leaving from another, which is a very easy way to really leave your itinerary in between open.  

Now, some people travel by the seat of their pants through Europe.  They have their Eurail pass and find places to stay when they get there.

Well, those people are not me.  I would be so stressed doing that, worried we wouldn't have somewhere to stay or it would be too expensive.  The other thing is that the Eurail pass isn't as cheap as it once was - and I found much cheaper tickets just by shopping 90 days in advance.  Granted, our train travel was really set and we couldn't miss any trains, but this ended up not being a problem at all.  Additionally, if we had just waited to find somewhere to stay in Paris when we got there, we would have been in major trouble.  Even just looking 2 months out, I would hesitate too long on booking a place by ~5 minutes and the place would be fully booked.  That place is constantly busy with tourists, I guess.

We are lucky to not be bound by the schoolyear right now for travel.  On the contrary, my work often slows down a little bit around September/October when school starts again.  So taking time off to travel in September when everyone else is heading back to work and school at the end of summer was just perfect - with a few exceptions that I'll discuss later.

I may or may not go through city by city, but I plan on discussing the highlights of our trip and where we definitely want to go back.  Spoiler alert, Paris is not on that list.  :)

Our itinerary for 14 days in Europe:

Brussels, Belgium

Bruges, Belgium

Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany

Munich, Germany

Salzburg, Austria/ day trip to Berchtesgaden, Germany

Alsace region, France

Paris, France.

I will be back with more!