Too many people get to the places they’ve waited their entire lives to see, only to race through the country as though it were on fire…
But I believe the key to actually enjoying travel is accepting the fact that you can’t see it all at once. Well, you can try. But for the average traveller with limited time, trying to see it all can easily become a miserable affair, spending more time travelling from place to place than actually enjoying any of the places they’ve travelled to. Instead, I believe in prioritizing the places that set your soul on fire and savouring them for several days at a time. This approach allows you to be truly immersed in the local culture, rather than treating each destination as another box to tick off for the sake of social media before rushing off to the next place on your checklist.
The EuroSprint Trap
This is a cautionary tale; my villain origin story if you will. My first big trip overseas was a disaster: My travelling companion and I had made a rookie mistake. We had fallen into the EuroSprint Trap, attempting to see six different countries in just six weeks. In hindsight this was a ridiculous plan, but at the time we thought it made sense given our limited budgets. More bang for our buck, right? Wrong. Not only is a week per country nowhere near enough time to immerse yourself in the local culture, but we also didn’t account for the many gruelling travel days that we would spend travelling between places. There were many 10+ hour train or bus rides (the longest being over 30 hours including transfers), nights spent in sometimes sketchy train stations, and living in a constant state of stress about how we would get to our next destination. To make matters worse, we hadn’t understood before we left for the trip that our Eurail passes, once activated, only lasted for 14 days before expiring. So, upon leaving Greece – our very first country – we found out that we only had two weeks to make it all the way to Amsterdam, where we were flying out of. Somehow, in these two weeks, we made it through Bulgaria, Hungary, Croatia, and Germany. With every place we passed through I felt cheated out of the true experience, seeing only a small part of a single city in each of the countries that we travelled through. I will never say that I regret that trip – it was a learning experience, and I did see many beautiful parts of the world – however, I did feel in the end that my time and budget could have been put to better use. It was a bit of a let down. So, reader beware of the EuroSprint Trap!
Why did I start this blog?
Well, because thinking up and planning fabulous trips sets me on fire. It’s always been a dopamine hit for me to think of the endless possibilities of places that I’ll have the opportunity to see throughout my lifetime — even if that potential trip is still years in the future. So I thought, why not let others take advantage of the research and planning that I’ve done in the meantime? While I haven’t taken most of the trips that I’ll be suggesting in my free travel outlines (yet), I have planned them all meticulously exactly as I would do the trip from start to finish, and taken out a lot of the guesswork that many travellers overlook.
So welcome; I hope you find my research useful. I would be incredibly honoured if my ideas inspired just one person to take the trip!