Introduction & Preparation

Dan: I've always wanted to go travelling so the idea to do some big, stupid trip has always been lingering in my head. After enjoying visits to a few places in Europe and the fact that it isn't very far away, it seemed like the ideal place to go. The vague idea quickly developed into a plan to plot specific places we wanted to see then get between them via train, since I'm not a huge fan of all the faff involved with flying and we could get a decent amount of discount with Interrail tickets. After a visit to the DIY shop and a hefty printing session we managed to bodge together a map complete with pins and string of where we wanted to go and a rough outline of the route we'd take.

The plan is to go for 3 months using trains for the majority of the journey, with a flight from Norway to the Netherlands. Places we'll be visiting: Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Valencia, Figueres, Nimes, Lyon, Geneva, Florence, Rome, Verona, Padova, Venice, Bled, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Trondheim, Bodo, Oslo, Rotterdam, Brugge. We planned our accommodation and booked most of it using AirBnB.

We're now pretty much set, with just things like odd bits of clothing to buy and some documents to print. It's not really sank in yet that we're doing this even though we've spent the last 3 months planning it and we set off in 9 days! The longest trip we've been on was a two week package holiday to Crete so it's quite a step up.