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!