Skip to main content

Final Thoughts

By

Settling into our new homes in the U.S., we have a few thoughts to share to sum up our adventure together!:

40 days, 8 countries, 29 cities
Amsterdam•Brussels•Bruges•Athens•Mykonos•Santorini•Palermo•Agrigento•Syracuse•Taormina•Positano•Pompeii•Rome•Florence•Pisa•CinqueTerre•Venice•Nice•Marseille•AixenProvence•Avignon•Barcelona•Madrid•Toledo•Lisbon•Sintra•Porto•Dublin•Galway

Superlatives:
Worst travel situation: getting to the Belgium airport
Best gelato: Ai Tre Tartufi in Rome
Best transportation: biking in Amsterdam and ATVing in Mykonos
Best day trip: Sintra outside Lisbon
Worst day trip: Toledo (bad planning on our part, the city is very nice)
Best free tour: Madrid
Best paid tour: Uffizi Gallery
Best sangria: rooftop bar in Lisbon
Best drink: Tinto de Verano
Best recommendation given to us: rooftop bar in Barcelona with a great view of the Sagrada Familia
Worst fad we’ve seen in Europe: popped collars
Country with the nicest people: Ireland
Best money we spent: striped pants lol
Worst money we spent: the Uber to the Brussels airport and the fee to check-in to a RyanAir flight at the airport...
Least value of our money: Eurail passes
Best Accommodation: Airbnb in Florence
Worst Accommodation: Hostel in Dublin
Best item we brought with us: Grace- small Target purse that holds everything, even a water bottle. Emily- Peru water bottle holder
Worst item we brought with us: smelly shoes
Item we brought but never used: N/A, everything was used!
Best insta location according to Instagram likes: tie between Mykonos (Grace) and Positano (Emily)
Biggest confusion: how do Europeans eat hot food for lunch on a hot day??
Least favorite things in Europe: small sidewalks, uneven sidewalks (we each tripped at least once a day), and lack of free water
Best discovery: watering holes
Best European song: Bella Ciao
Most ridiculous thing about Europe: the nightlife scene starting at 2 am
Laughing so hard we cried: #1- joking about sleeping in the airport in Athens and writing a review on it, #2- the food at our lunch restaurant in Toledo, #3- the hostel situation in Dublin
Biggest ripoff: #1- getting scammed at the gas station in Mykonos, #2- not getting change back at lunch in Lisbon even after asking for it
What we can never escape: pigeons
Best food: hamburger in Rotterdam (lol), tagliata steak in Rome, and pizza in Palermo
Dumbest moments: never knowing the historical significance of what we were looking at and, more specifically, not knowing Marseille was a major city...
Biggest scare: Ventimiglia (there’s more to the story than what was included in the blog)
New thing Emily learned about Grace: Grace has trouble getting on and off escalators
New thing Grace learned about Emily: How much Emily loves history
Most unrealistic expectation: planning to workout every day of this trip (we did one workout)
Best find: food halls
Worst startup idea: Shazam for bird calls
Best startup idea: wait and see ;)
Best timing: being here during the World Cup
Worst timing: missing every Pride event and major concert
Biggest struggle: how difficult it is to post on blogger.com from an iPad (you can’t scroll...google it and you’ll see there’s no fix, so please excuse any errors you saw in the posts)
Day with the most steps: May 29 with 27,267 steps (includes the 6 mile hike in Santorini)
Most clutch things: booking tickets for sites in advance and washing machines in Airbnbs
Favorite city: It’s very difficult for us to answer this. We even feel that it’s impossible because over these 6 weeks we were trying to see as much as possible, which usually meant all of the tourist sites. We weren’t anywhere long enough to get the opportunity to really experience the culture. This trip allowed us to see so many places and figure out where we’d like to return to actually experience the culture!


BONUS! What Europeans wear:
-Levi’s shirts (white shirt, white letters with a red block around it)
-Striped pants
-Yankees hats with an obvious look that the person can’t name anyone on the Yankees
-White shirts with a square of a background of a beach and then says a beach in LA- Venice, Santa Monica, etc. with an obvious look that the person has never been to LA before
-Hard Rock Cafe t-shirts
-Popped collars on old guys

Special thanks to all of those who joined us on the trip!: Emma, Nikki, and Jackson 

Friends we saw along the way: Bobby and Dana, Ben, Paul, Jonathan, and Marc 

Recommendation Tally (thank you!!):
Maddie- 9
Melissa- 3
Johnson- 3
Faith- 2
Mariana- 2
Anthony- 2
Anna- 1
Stacey- 1
Ricky- 1
Samantha- 1
Ben- 1
Zach- 1
Dr. Kelley- 1
Eliza- 1
and last but not least...
Trip advisor- 739471937

We’ll be creating a travel guide so message/comment if you ever are going to any of these places and want more specific advice!
Main tips:
#1 Do a free walking tour the first day you get to a new city. It helps you cross off the major tourist locations, tells you which tourist locations to go back to/go inside of, and gives you local recommendations for restaurants and what to do in the area.
#2 Bring a travel book! Most landmarks and sites no longer have paper maps or pamphlets with information. Bring a travel book on the country you’re going to or at least download the Wikipedia pages!
#3 Book tickets for sites in advance to skip lines.

This trip was a great way to end the first quarter of our lives and life as we know it. HUGE thank you to our parents for making this trip possible and setting us up for the future. 

Thank you to all of our readers! We’re happy to have this travel blog to look back on in the future.

We’ll leave you with this famous quote that we actually first heard in a Portugal tourism ad that played during the World Cup games:
When something good happens, travel to celebrate. When something bad happens, travel to forget. When nothing happens, travel to make something happen.

 This trip has solidified the fact that we want to continue traveling throughout our lives; maybe this blog will even make a comeback. Here’s to the next awaited adventure!

No longer continued (for now),
Grace & Emily

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 21, 2018 at 6:53 AM

    Ditto Alexandra’s comment. Loved reading. You are off to new adventures now. Enjoy! Mom (Emily’s)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Greece (Part 2)

By
MYKONOS and SANTORINI 5/26-5/29 We landed in Mykonos in the early morning around 7am. Luckily we did not have to run at all and we were feeling better about our transportation issues. Since we were tired of paying for over-priced taxis, we decided to walk 40ish minutes to Mykonos town where we were staying in an Airbnb. The walk was nice and as we approached the town, we began searching for our Airbnb. Fortunately, we have an app called maps.me which has been a lifesaver. We can download the maps on wifi and then use them to get around when we do not have wifi. Thank you 21st century technology. Yet, we still struggled to find the place since there are little to no street signs and no numbers on the buildings. Once we located our Airbnb it was still too early to check in. We decided to walk the streets to find some breakfast. We ended up sitting right along the water at the Old Port at a cute restaurant. The kitchen still was not open at 8am but we could sit and get coffee. Emily ...
2 comments
Read more

Iceland

By
Iceland (6/30-7/8) Landed in Iceland with Grace and had to sadly say goodbye to her by her gate for her flight to Los Angeles. It was sad leaving my travel buddy since we have been with each other 24/7 for the past 5.5 weeks. Couldn’t have done this with trip anyone else. Day 1 (6/30) I met up with my parents (Lisa and John) outside the airport. They had already picked up the rental car and tablet which would be our guide. The planned route was a circle around Iceland starting in southern Iceland.  We set off for the famous Blue Lagoon. Blue Lagoon been here since 1226 but was built into the facilities it is today in 1980s. The water is warmed from the center of the earth and cools as it rises. At the surface it was 100 degrees. Iceland has tons of geothermic activity with steam venting from various areas all over the south west region. At the Blue Lagoon we enjoyed the warm waters and two different special face masks from the silica and algae found in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Florence, Pisa, Cinque Terre, & Venice

By
FLORENCE 6/7-6/9 Early in the morning, we took the metro to the train station in Rome. We forgot to share that the metro is really convenient and makes it easy to get around Rome! We then took the 3.5 hour train to Florence, sleeping for most of it. We arrived in Florence and headed to our Airbnb. It was a great find! It’s a cute one bedroom with a lofted kitchen and a little patio where you get a rooftop view of Florence. The owner even left us a welcome basket with cookies, pasta, pesto sauce, and water!!! We headed out quickly to check out the Medici Chapels (the accent is on the third syllable not the second!). We learned a bit about how important the Medici family was (created the first bank) and read a pamphlet on the chapels. The chapels are in the San Lorenzo Basilica. Shortly after, we headed to the Accademia Galleria. This is where Michelangelo’s David was and WOW!!! We had discussed how we aren’t that fascinated by sculptures and prefer paintings, but once we walked into ...
1 comment
Read more