Ashley and Stacy in front of Big Ben
More than three years after the fact, I can no longer say why we decided that the appropriate place to go for a joint graduation trip was Europe, but that’s where we ended up. I do know that we decided where in Europe we were going to go by each making lists of our top five or so cities, and then comparing and meshing them together. Luckily, for the sake of this series of posts, my OCPD has left me with a very detailed itinerary document to remind me of the details.
After this trip, nobody can say that we weren’t ambitious. We ended up going to 9 cities in 6 countries over the span of 17 days. It maybe didn’t make the most sense in terms of the order that we visited them, but we flew to and from Europe with another friend of ours, which is why we ended in London and not in Dublin.
Similar to our Iceland series, we will have individual posts for each of the stops we made throughout this trip, including information about travel, lodging, any activities we did, and approximate costs. During our initial planning process, we attempted to figure things out so it wouldn’t be too touristy, but we eventually ended up caving on that a little bit, with the mindset that if these one or two days in each place would be the only time we’d ever make it to these places, we probably should see some of the classic/cliché sites. One thing we did really try to work in at each place, as much as we could, was to make sure we got to a high place (tower, mountain, church, Ferris wheel, etc.) that would give us a bird’s eye view of whatever city we were in.
The overview map of our 2015 trip to Europe
Day 12-13: Ireland (Dublin and Cliffs of Moher)
Ashley and Stacy on the cliffs around Santander
A few side notes. We had more than one friend whose initial reaction when we told them about this trip was “Don’t get taken.” Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys. There was also a lot of real concern from our parents – we were two girls in our early 20s who were going to be traveling through a lot of big, busy cities, and it was only a few months after the attacks in Paris. I had lived in Spain for eight weeks as part of a study abroad program a few years before, but neither one of us had ever done anything like this trip was going to entail.
Our precautions? We each had a backpack and a small carry-on bag only. We made sure that wallets, passports, extra money, etc. was always in an inner pocket unless they were immediately needed. When we were walking through cities, I had a camera bag that I made sure was always latched shut and a cross-body bag that zipped. Our phones were in bags when they weren’t in our hands. There was no point that either one of us felt remotely unsafe.
Final thoughts. We both converted money before leaving, and left the majority of it behind in our hotels when we went exploring, only bringing small amounts at a time, even though almost every place we went also took cards (we also made sure to give a list of where we were going to our card companies). I took index cards and wrote the name and address of each hotel on them so we could just give those to cab drivers instead of stumbling with language barriers (we both speak Spanish, but wanted to make sure we were safe in Italy and France, and it came in handy in Paris especially!). I printed my itinerary and any e-tickets that we had ahead of time, and kept everything in a portfolio of sorts. Finally, don’t knock the selfie-stick. Yes, you end up looking like complete tourists, but that way you don’t need to trust random strangers with your phones or expensive cameras, and you can still get pictures of yourselves, which is something I have very few of from my study abroad trip when I didn’t have one.
Remember the above photo? This is what we looked like taking it. Don’t knock the selfie-sticks 🙂
