Welcome to my European Adventure

This blog is about my experience backpacking through Europe; the Cosmopolitan London, the Romantic Paris, the Vibrant Spain, the Delicious Italy, and the Authentic Greece. Through the ups and the downs this was overall an incredible trip where I saw some of the world's most amazing sites and architecture, experienced different cultures, and grew more as a person in the process.

(Mathew Carey, 1811)

But before I get into that let's rewind to two years ago, I am just about to start grade twelve and a good friend of mine, Clerissa, and I go out for breakfast. We begin talking about all the places in the world we'd love to see. This discussion soon turns into "how about we don't go straight into university so we can see all these amazing places!", and before we know it we've replaced university applications with travel books and brochures.

Now let's fast forward to about a year and a half later, we have been working hard all year long saving every penny in anticipation for this big adventure. However, all we have is a rough plan of everything we'd like to see and approximately the dates we will go see it all. So, first things first, we head straight over to Flight Centre and book our round trip flights for May 7th - June 16th 2012. These flights were with KLM Dutch Airlines, an extraordinary airline, we were exceedingly pleased with the service we got from them! They would fly us into Amsterdam first, have a two hour stop over, and then head to our first destination London. Now that we have our beginning and end dates we can start booking the hostels through Hosteling International, which has been recommended to us by Flight Centre who sells the membership cards you need in order to book through this hosteling company. All of these hostels were very reasonably priced and in fairly good locations. Having the dates that we`d be in each hostel made it easy for us to move on to the next step, booking flights between the countries. For this we booked through EasyJet, which are very cheap flights between European countries. As with everything, however, you get what you pay for so we found that on these flights the service isn't the best but it gets you from country to country for a very good price. Many people we met along the way also used Eurail passes which are a good option as well. As for getting from city to city, we didn't worry about it in advance, it was very easy to book a train or bus to the next city once we were there.

We have everything booked and the departure date is creeping up faster and faster! The next step now is just to buy a few items in preparation, the biggest item being the backpack, what I will soon be living out of for five and a half weeks. For this I went to Mountain Equipment Co-op where they sized me to the perfect backpack for my needs. Some backpacks have the feature on the zipper to put a lock on, however mine did not, so as an alternative we found a netting to go around my backpack specifically made for backpackers to lock up their belongings. We found this lock at Campers Village along with a few other essentials for the trip.

Now it`s time for Clerissa and I to experience the adventure we`d been anticipating for two years. Let the journey begin!