Plucky Survivors See Europe: Planning & Research & Maps, Oh My!

Yeah, so that whole “I know exactly where I’m going on my 10-week road trip through Europe” thing fell apart pretty quickly when I started doing the actual research for the trip.

I was a travel writer for a long time and the advice I would always give people is “do your research.” Back in the day that meant reading guidebooks and trusting their “expert opinion” but most of that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been replaced by crowd-sourced opinions, which I think must taken with a grain of salt so big that it would require doubling your blood pressure medication.

I started with hotels. I don’t like to stay in vacation rentals or B&Bs. I’ve never been comfortable staying in other people’s houses – I feel like an intruder instead of a guest. Plus, the DIY nature of AirBNBs (what do you mean I have to strip the sheets and take out the trash before I leave?) and the communal nature of a B&B (I really don’t want to talk to Marge from Poughkeepsie just to get a homemade scone) make me itch in unspecified ways. I want to stay in a place where there is always someone at the check-in desk, daily housekeeping, and all the other niceties that come along with a hotel. While I often joke that my idea of camping is a hotel without room service, the place I choose to lay down my head doesn’t have to fancy, but it can’t be frightening.

I used Trip Advisor as a jumping off point, using the map feature and its built-in crowd-sourced ratings (nothing less than 4 stars) to find hotels I thought would work. Then I checked the hotels websites to look at photos, see if they have services and amenities like parking, and what the rates would be since you can usually get the cheapest (and most flexible) by booking directly.

This is where the first changes to my itinerary started happening because some of the places I intended to visit were either too expensive or there were no good hotels available in the areas in which I wanted to stay. Throw in the fact that I was going to have a car and therefore needed a place to park it – not always easy in Europe I have discovered – and it drove some modifications. For instance, I really wanted to stay in Monaco to be able to experience the James Bond casino vibes, but there are only a handful of hotels, and they were priced so high that it made my eyes water. So, instead, I’m staying in Nice for a couple of days and driving the 13 miles to Monaco.

Flexible booking was also a big factor. In a few cities, the only options at most of the hotels were to pre-pay all or part of the rate with no refunds for cancellation or changes allowed. I know it costs a little more, but in general I like to have the flexibility to be able to change my mind. It also can save money in the long run since you can book a hotel to guarantee it, periodically check the websites  to see if the rates have gone down, and if so, then cancel and rebook. Especially on a trip like this where the unexpected should be expected, I felt like pre-paying was not the way to go unless I had absolutely no other choice.

I narrowed it down to a few lodging options and then I did further research by reading online travel guides, personal blogs, and user reviews to get it down to a final decision. Flex cancel bookings were made!

Once I had a place to sleep in all the destinations, I started working on the things I wanted to see and do while I was in each of them. I started with the official visitor websites for each city or region, which is where you can usually find the most comprehensive list of options for things like museums, attractions, tours, and events. I say usually because some places either didn’t have a site, it sucked, or it was in a language I don’t speak and required a lot of asking Chrome to “translate this page.”

In general, art museums, old churches, ruins, nature activities, and beaches are not really my cup of tea and the vast majority of the things that most people want to see in Europe fall into one of those categories. I’m more of an off-the-beaten track kind of guy and enjoy unusual museums, roadside attractions, exploring cool neighborhoods, unexpected discoveries, and entertainment so I focused on those categories by visiting sites like AtlasObscura.com, which specializes in those types of things.  I also did a LOT of Googling of terms like “things to do in (insert city)” to add to the list.

The final step was to check out the things that were between Point A and Point B. A maxim of a great road trip is that it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to drive past something cool just so I could get to where I was going. Wait… there’s a Bread Museum in Ulm, Germany on the road between Stuttgart and Salzburg? I am SO there!

Along the way, I checked details like opening hours to make sure the things I wanted to see were going to be available on the days of the week I was going to be there.

This drove additional changes in the itinerary. I moved some stops around so that I could visit some attractions that would’ve been closed otherwise and swapped out a few cities altogether. These were places I had thought I wanted to visit but couldn’t find enough of interest to do there to keep them on the road trip, especially since there were other options that worked better.

After collecting what I thought was an exhaustive (and potentially exhausting) list, I painstakingly went through and mapped the distance between the things I wanted to see and the places I was going to be staying, grouped them by location where I could, and figured out public transportation options if there were any, even going so far as to download apps for things like the U-Bahn in Berlin and the Metro in Paris. This made me swap out some hotels because they weren’t convenient. Should I have done this step first and then picked hotels? Probably. Live and learn.

I have collected all of this in a Google Sheet that has over 1,000 rows on it. Am I going to do every single thing on it? No. Am I going to stick to the itinerary every minute of every day? Absolutely not. But the way I like to travel is to know all of the things that I want to do and then I can make an informed decision when I get there on whether I want to do them. If I’m walking down the street and see some cool museum or shop or restaurant I want to try, at least I know what I’m giving up by doing so instead of wondering what I might be missing out on.

But I wasn’t even close to being done with the planning and the itinerary changes. Driving in Europe presents its own set of challenges, but that’s a story for another post.

Next: The Roads Less Traveled