Our 3 week Europe trip

Long story short, Mr Wanderer raced an airplane and won two business class return tickets to Europe from Cape Town. The story really is as crazy and it sounds, read about it here: Our Proposal Story.

We decided to go in June/July 2014 which for us was the most amazing thing to be able to leave behind our winter and go straight in to Europe’s summer. The more sun the better!

But where to go in Europe when you only have 3 weeks? It’s impossible, so we just went with the mindset that we will come back one day and do all the countries that didn’t make the list.

Our Europe Itinerary

A) ENGLAND (LONDON)
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Eurostar from London to Paris

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B) FRANCE (PARIS)
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RyanAir came in as the cheapest flight from Paris to Zadar (Croatia)

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C) CROATIA
See our post on planning 10 days in Croatia
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Dubrovnik to Venice via Milan on EasyJet

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D) ITALY
See our post on planning 1 week in Italy

Planning a Eurotrip

Visas

Firstly, being a South African can really suck at times! Especially when you fall in love with another South African and your hopes of ever getting a second passport are gone! The Rand is already so weak compared to almost everything and now on top of that we have to pay for visas to almost everywhere!

How depressing was that? And this is often the reason why South Africans don’t go to Europe, and it is completely justified. But we have come to accept how incredibly privileged we are in many other ways that Europeans are not, so we just have to suck it up, take the punch and not let it hold us back from traveling the world!

So, we took the punch and plus-minus R6000 later, we had two visas in our passports:
UK visa for London, and
Schengen Visa for France, Croatia and Italy.

Internal Travel in Europe

We were pleasantly surprised at how cheap you can pick up flights, but watch out for the catch – bag restrictions. RyanAir for us was almost always the cheapest.

If you are going to major cities such as London, Paris or Rome, consider getting tickets to the Hop-on-Hop-off Red buses. If you are pushed for time but still want to see all the sights and attractions then this bus is so perfect. It is completely flexible so you can go on any route and stay as long as you want at each place. Walking around the cities are still the best way to explore, but if you only have two days or so then the tickets are completely worth your while!