i haven’t had a chance to start posting photos from the three-week backpacking trip to europe that my brother and i went on this summer [except for this video that has a whole bunch of footage from our trip… so fun!]. as an intro to all our photos, i’d like to start with a few posts on how to plan a backpacking trip to europe. it can seem daunting at first, but ours went surprisingly smoothly, and i’d like to share some tips and tricks we learned along the way.
so, first things first – planning a route. some people like to fly by the seat of their pants or be more flexible while they’re there in terms of which cities they go to and when, and if that’s you, some of these posts may seem like overkill. but i’m a planner, and when we were going on our backpacking trip, i wanted to ensure that we planned far enough in advance to save a little money and book the best hostels before they filled up. if you’re also this type, i’d recommend planning the route as early as possible so you can start getting your accommodations booked.
here’s the way i would [and did] go about planning a route:
1. make a list of the cities you want to visit. if you’re anything like me, this might be a lengthy list.
2. print a map and mark them on the map. here’s an example of what mine looked like when i started:
3. determine how long you want the trip to be. this will usually depend on your budget and how much vacation time/free time you have to travel. don’t forget to factor in the travel days to and from europe – generally speaking, flights out of the US flying to europe leave in the late afternoon/evening and arrive in the morning the next day, and flights from europe to the US leave in the morning and arrive in the US on the same day, in the afternoon. the first day that you arrive, you will basically be a zombie, so don’t plan anything strenuous on that day and don’t count it as a day to sightsee, even if you arrive in the morning. by the time you get settled and get your bearings in your state of jetlaggedness, you won’t feel like doing too much else.
4. look at some options of different cities to fly into. do you want to fly in and out of the same city to make a loop, or would you like to fly in and out of different cities? i always like flying in and out of different cities, but it can make the flights a little more expensive.
5. connect the dots in a logical way. it’s generally easier on your body to fly west to east.
6. do a little bit of research on each city to determine how long you want to spend in each place. my personal recommendation is to spend at least 2 nights in every city, except for maybe if it’s a small town with short travel times on either end. you don’t want to be spending more time on the road than exploring the city [and this is coming from someone who’s a “goer” and likes to see as many places as possible in short amounts of time. but trust me].
on our backpacking trip, we spent two nights in all of the cities except for two 3-night stays [in hamburg, because we were visiting my friend gianina, and prague, because it was a long train ride to get there] and one 1-night stay [in bruges, a small town less than an hour from brussels]. it seemed to work well, but again, we’re goers. i was worried that two nights would be too short, but in most places, it was perfect for the type of trip we were taking, where we were trying to see as much as we could – it’s nice to feel like you could still stay longer but we also felt like we got to see a lot, and now we know the cities that we’d like to return to someday. additionally, we were mostly staying in hostels, and while we lucked out and didn’t have any bad experiences, some accommodations were more ideal than others, and it was nice to know that we weren’t stuck in a place for more than a few days.
BUT if you’re looking for something a bit more relaxing or want to get to know the cities really well, i’d recommend at least three nights in each city. you can easily spend two weeks in most of the major cities in europe and not run out of things to do.
7. research how you’re going to get from city to city and how much time you will need to plan for that. check prices to make sure train/plane tickets are within your budget, and make sure you look at travel times from city to city. i discovered in my planning process that distances look so much shorter on little maps. :)
8. now that you know how long your trip is going to be and how long you want to spend in the different cities, you’ll [most likely] have to pare down your itinerary to be able to fit in everything, realistically. it may help to section europe off into areas and then decide which area[s] you want to hit. when we planned our trip, we decided to stay in the northern/central part of europe in terms of latitude because it made sense logistically based on where the majority of the cities we wanted to go to were. we had already been to northern italy and the UK, and i had been to northern france. i really wanted to go to spain, portugal, southern france, morocco, southern italy, and greece, but those are a bit more difficult to get to by train, so we decided to skip them and put them on our list of places to visit down the road. prioritize and eliminate, and then make yourself feel better by telling yourself that it will be a reason to take other trips to europe in the future, to visit the places that you don’t get to go to on this trip!
9. map it out. this is what our itinerary ended up looking like once we finally got it nailed down:
10. write everything down – the tentative dates that you plan on traveling, where you’ll be and when, and the approximate travel time between cities. this is especially important when you’re going to lots of different cities, because otherwise, you will forget. an AMAZING app/site to use is trip it – i highly recommend it. with trip it, you create an itinerary, and then you can forward confirmation emails from hotels, hostels, train tickets, plane tickets, etc. to them, and they will add it to your itinerary, which you can access from the app, even in airplane mode. you can put in all kinds of details, including directions, reservation information, hours of operation, costs, etc., so i also used it to add in things that i didn’t want to miss doing in each city. it was pretty much my bible for those three weeks with keeping up with hostels, train times and stations. additionally, it was useful beforehand in the planning process as i was booking the hostels – it helped me keep my dates straight, and i could access our schedule from my phone or any computer.
aaaaaaaaaaand now you can all get planning for your next europe trip. :) stay tuned for more backpacking tips coming soon!