Here we go! The trip has finally started! Me, Ashley, and Mom are beyond excited to take on a new endeavor of backpacking Europe instead of camping around the USA. All the planning we had done up to this point was about to be tested. We are about to embark on an adventure of epic proportions, full of history, culture, landscapes, and magical buildings that Europe is renown for. Our plans utilize pre-booked flights, hotels, travel credit cards, cash budgets, connecting trains, planes, cars, and incredible people to meet along the way. This truly will be one for the record books!
Today we left my house in Tampa Florida, and headed down to Miami to start this trip. The plan is to pick mom up at her house and take her with us for the first week. The reason for this is to utilize our time appropriately for this section of the adventure.
To me, planning is one of the top priorities and even one of the most exciting parts of travel to me. It inspires me to see pictures when I research sites, landscapes, buildings, and restaurants to visit. Me and Ashley had an intense timeframe to get done what we wanted. It was to encompass 86 days (almost 3 months) around the entire continent of Europe.
The timing for mom to come along at the beginning, was she was not only ready for vacation, but with the Eurail passes we bought, we had 2 months of usage. Since we had already spent $2400 on these rail passes, I made absolutely sure we maximized the time and travel for this. The idea was for my mom to come with and drive us (since she knew how to drive stick) around France to towns and sites that are not easily accessible by train. This worked out well, as we had both had needed this to get around France, and with that we determined the beginning stage of the trip would be best spent by car. She could drive stick ,which allowed us to get to places otherwise inaccessible by train, and the cost of gas and insurance for the rental car was very low compared to other automatic cars. Mom would be with us for a week, and then drive the car back to Paris, after she dropped us at our first starting train station…Strasbourg.
Now, we headed south to Miami from Tampa (which is a 4 hour drive) and our only goal was to get to the airport two hours early. We successfully did this, and parked the car in long-term parking which was a small lot just off the main stretch to the Airport. I don’t particularly like flying from Miami, but for 3 people to fly at 420$ vs $680 a person, it saved us $260 for the flights per person, and made sense for us to go this direction. This is a great start to planning and saving money this trip.
Miami airport is my least favorite airport I have had the experience to fly out of. The check in in this particular instance extremely frustrating, as they couldn’t locate my ticket by name, and only by confirmationnumber, which took me a while to obtain. This was stressful as I didn’t want to start the trip backed up. Once we finally checked in at the airport, and got to our flight, we headed to the terminal, and grabbed some pizza for lunch at Pizza Hut, in order to fuel up for our 8 hour flight to London. It was now time to Fly even though our flight had a 30 minute delay!
As much as this shouldn’t be considered a day of the trip, how could I leave out the beginning of the adventure?! Our goal today was to utilize our flights from Miami to Paris. This included a drive from Tampa of 4 hours, and a connection in London….putting us in Paris at 1pm the next day with a 6 hour time change. Very busy transfer for travel!
JULY 1- fly to Paris British Airways
206 5:10pm-London 6:40 conf #OPKJOZ connect to 8:50am- paris 11:10am flight 306
EXPENSES-
18.87 Gas
3 Coffee
20.82 Pizza at airport
6.97 Soup and pastry in London
Total- 49.66 / 3 people