Top Five: Before You Go

Taking a trip to Europe isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world. There’s a lot of planning that goes into it, a lot of things that you need to lean and do before you leave, and here I’ve put together some of what I think are the most important of those. Aside from, you know, getting plane/train tickets and figuring out where you’ll be staying. 

Top Five Things to Do Before You Go

Research every city.

This is extremely important to do before you book the place you’ll be staying. Figure out what part of the city you want to be in, what area has more of the things you want to see, and if the place you’re staying is close to public transport if you’re not planning on taking taxis everywhere you go. For example, in London we ended up staying near Paddington Station. It’s close to Kensington Gardens and a few other things, but most of what we wanted to see was a ways away, closer to the Thames. But since we were near Paddington, we could easily use public transportation (Paddington is a hub for trains, underground, and buses) to get where we wanted to go. Find out if you’ll be staying in an area locals say is safe or fun, and make sure you’ll be in a place where you won’t feel uncomfortable leaving your stuff in your room.

Figure out how to get from the airport to where you’re staying.

As opposed to what I’ve seen in the majority of large cities I've been to in the States, airports in big cities in Europe are a fair ways outside the city. In Iceland, this meant we had a forty minute bus ride into Reykjavik. In Dublin, it meant a half hour bus ride into the city. And in London, it meant catching the Heathrow Connect to Paddington Station (another half hour journey). Honestly, this wasn’t something I’d thought of doing before we left, but I’m glad Mum did! It saved a lot of stress on landing, to already know how to get into the city and to the place where we were staying. In a lot of cities, you won’t want to take a taxi (they're far more expensive than alternate public transport). So it’s important to figure out an alternate route, even if it means a twenty minute walk to your hotel.

Make a list of things you want to do, and get tickets online.

Obviously, it’s important to make a list of all the things you want to do wherever you’ll be going, and to rank things by how much you want to do them. There’s no point doing something low on the list if it means you’ll have to miss out on something you really want to do. But it’s also a huge time saver (and money saver) to get some of your tickets ahead of time. I don’t recommend doing it with everything, because then your schedule will be so rigid that you’ll have no wiggle room if you change your mind, but it’s nice to get about half of your tickets ahead of time. For example, when we were in London we’d planned out our first three days and gotten tickets for the Tower of London, a Thames cruise, and tickets to see Phantom of the Opera, but our second three days we left open to do whatever we wanted, and had a list of possible things we could do.

Buy guidebooks.

I really didn’t want to be an obvious tourist. That meant I didn’t want to walk around cities with a guidebook in my hands. But I did want to know what I was doing when I got there, which was why the books came in handy. We purchased ours a few months before we left, and spent a lot of time perusing them and finding things we wanted to do, places that sounded good to eat, and travel ideas in general throughout the city. It was also helpful to familiarize ourselves with maps of every city, so we had a general idea of where everything was within the city. This also made it easier when we got there, because we already had a basic knowledge of where we were going while we walked around. Google Maps is great, but sometimes it gets confused when you’re standing between tall buildings.

Work out. A lot. Especially if you plan on walking for the most part while you’re there.

This was something we’d started doing way back last year. Mum and I wanted to get into better shape in general, but then we’d talked about wanting to walk as much as we could around Europe. And then we realized that if we couldn’t even walk a couple miles a day at home we would never make it in Europe. So we started working out, and we’re both very glad we did. Strength training made it easier to haul our luggage to and from airports and places where we were staying, and cardio made it possible for us to walk approximately ten miles every day, which allowed us to see more of the sights and spend less time on a bus or in an underground station. Without those workouts, we wouldn’t have gotten through half of the fun things we did while we were gone.

And those are my Top Five. I’m glad we did all of them, and I highly recommend doing each and every one. Obviously. When you get there, you’ll want to have an idea of what you’re going to do and not be thrown into the deep end, trust me. So do as much as you can before you go, and make sure you’re ready for a trip packed with fun—and as little stress as possible. 

[love]

{Rani D.}