Backpacking Europe: Making a Plan

Whether it’s visiting Disneyland or backpacking across a continent, you need to have a plan in place. This is not only for the tourism part, but also for safety, and mapping out the components of your plan is one of the most important steps. When making the plan for your trip, there are four main steps that need to be thought out completely, because the results of these during your trip will decide if it’s your dream trip, or the trip from hell. The steps that will make or break your trip are: making your itinerary, making the budget of your money, getting your passports and visas, and mapping out the transports for each city that you visit.

To begin, we’ll start with the step that everyone needs to start off with when making your plan: planning out the itinerary of your journey.

• Mark down on a map all the cities that you want to visit.

• Write out all the sites of each city that you want to see.

• Cut down the list to the must-see sites of each city.

• Connect the dots for the sites of each city so that you can determine how much time that you need to spend in each place to see all that you want.

• IMPORTANT: when making your itinerary, make sure to leave “wiggle” room for each city in case you need to make changes to your plans.

The second step that you need to make is budgeting your money for the trip. This step is the next important because before you leave, you need to make sure that you have enough money with you. To make your budget, first separate it into two parts: your pre-fees, for all the materials that you need to bring with you, and then your trip fees. Planning out the money for the pre-fees is easy; however, it’s the fees for your trip that need to be carefully divided and to do this, you need to do some research.

• You need to find out all that you can about the costs for food, transportation, sleeping arrangements, and any activities that you want to partake in.

• You need to combine the cost and figure out the reality of what you’ll be able to do, and if you’ll be able to get enough money in time for everything.

Thirdly, you’ll need to get yourself a passport and visas so that you can travel abroad. Now, for your passport, you should try to get it as early as you can because of the wait that it could take for them to make it, or even just renew it; at best, you should file to it at least four months before you plan to leave on your voyage. If you don’t get it done early, you can get it expedited; however that will cost you more money. Now concerning visas, odds are that if you live in Canada, US, European Union, New Zealand, Australia, or Japan then you won’t need one; however, if your trip is going to take you outside of the European Union, to places like Russia, then you’ll need to check with their embassies to find out.

The fourth, and final step, of making your plan is mapping out the transportation of each city that you visit. To find out what kind of transportation that each city has, you can check out their websites or try asking someone on a travel forum. Now, concerning the different kinds of transportations, there are four main travel techniques:

• Travelling by train: this is the most classic method that most travellers use, because of the low cost and reliability.  

• Travelling by plane: this one, while faster than the others, is also more expensive; so it’s suggested that you only use this one for the major part of your travel.

• Travelling by bus: this one is probably the cheapest way to travel, and the way to find out about the bus routes of the city you’re visiting is to ask the people of the hostel that you’re staying in.

• Travelling by car: this one is only suggested if you’re travelling in a group, because of the cost that it can be for renting a car and filling it up with gas.

One final thing before this ends, and that is that when you’re travelling, you should always keep your money, passport, visas, and other important documents on you, and hidden at all times, because you can never know what’s going to happen no matter where you are.