I am so excited to get the opportunity to book another international trip coming up in 2022! This year we were blessed to get to travel internationally over to Iceland (you can read my 2 posts from that trip here and here), and next year we’ve decided to take on Europe!
One morning at brunch, Aubrey and I started randomly brainstorming how we would do a Europe trip. From those early plans, we have built our next international adventure to be a 2 week European trip! This will be extra special because we both had Europe trips planned pre-pandemic that had to be cancelled. The good news is, now we get to do the trip together! Here’s what we have put together so far, and how we’re tackling getting this bucket list trip planned out.
Dates
Ideally, we wanted to try to visit Europe during their off season. We wanted to do this for obvious reasons, most of which revolving around pricing. But, the best laid plans don’t always work out right? What we’re actually going to do is build the trip around an event, which will dictate our timeframe. Normally we would never do it this way, but I will say that I am super excited about this event!
Small backstory: Aubrey loves F1. I am a NASCAR girl at heart, but when we started dating I started watching the Netflix series Drive to Survive to try to understand what the big deal was. If you haven’t watched this series DO IT! I was hooked quickly, and now we watch F1 every weekend that it’s on.
So, we’ve had our eye on attending the first ever F1 race in Miami that is happening next year. Unfortunately, tickets have essentially sold out after going on pre-sale and the pricing is just absurd. After thinking through it, we figured why not go to an F1 race abroad if we’re going to be paying that much for it anyway? That landed us on Aubrey (impulsively) buying tickets to the Silverstone race outside of London on July 3rd. All that to say, we went from wanting to go to Europe in the off season to going smack dab in the middle of the busiest tourist season they have.
Once we finalized our dates as those first 2 weeks in July, it was time to start figuring out how long we were going to spend where. That takes us to making a list of where we wanting to stop!
Stops
We were pretty definitive when it came to the places we wanted to visit on this trip. Of course you can never get everything you want, but I think our schedule is pretty great! Here’s our plan:
- Start by flying into London
- Take a train from London to Paris
- From Paris, fly to Monaco
- Fly from Monaco to Venice
- Finish by flying from Venice to Rome
The flights to Monaco, Venice, and Rome are all inexpensive, so we figured it makes more sense to get that time back than try to do it all by train. I’ll be anxious to see if it all works out the way we think it will!
Flights
I am really excited about how we’re going to be able to do our flights for this trip! Last year, Aubrey and I both got travel credit cards to start building rewards. This made a lot of sense at the time, because we were flying back and forth to see each other once a month. Now, we’ve built up enough points that we should be able to get our round trip Europe flights for free!
The card I have is the Chase Sapphire Preferred card, and I really enjoy it. Points are easy to accumulate and use, and the yearly fee is only $95! If you’re want to know more about this card, you can follow this link!
I would also highly suggest getting on Nerd Wallet and shopping around. The website is an outstanding tool when looking at new credit cards for whatever suits you best!
Hotels
So far, finding our hotel in each city has been the most overwhelming part of planning this trip for me. Because of that, I chose to delegate this task over to Aubrey! He is incredibly detail oriented and great with tasks like this where there are so many options that I get frustrated. He put together a list of 3-4 options for each city, and we went through and looked at them all together. We were able to narrow it down pretty easily, and have nailed down where we plan to stay in each place!
I’ll share more about the individual hotels in a different post because those details can get lengthy. But, I’m excited to go through where and why we’re staying where we are!
Final Thoughts
That’s what we’ve got so far! Slowly we’ve been researching what we want to see and do in each place. As we start to put those plans together I’ll share what we are excited to do. We’re very excited for this adventure and I look forward to getting to share our process and trip with you!
If you’ve been to Europe before and have any tips or tricks to share, we would love to hear them in the comments!