We’re gone! We got our visas, packed those bags, made plans for cell phones, insurance, and finances, found a home for our cat, packed up our house, and said good-byes. At the end of it all, we hopped on a plane and took a one-way flight to fly 4,600 miles away. Pretty nuts to think of it that way, but we couldn’t be more excited.
THE PLAN
While we have arrived in Europe, we are not yet in our future home in France. We don’t move to France officially until November 1st–which is technically Kevin’s start date and the first day of our visas. And while we HAVE been looking for barebones, cheap flights, this arrival date is not because we found the world’s longest one-way flight. It’s because we wanted to take advantage of the extra time before Kevin starts work in November to hit up some other European countries (obvi).
Instead, we’re in Poland a couple hours away from Krakow!
Post 14 hours of travel.
We plan to hit up a total of 6 (possibly more!) countries in the 6 weeks we have before November 1st. We don’t know how many exactly because we’re leaving our travel plans largely un-booked and open. We have a few major cities in mind and a couple flights booked to get between a couple countries, but since we plan on taking trains and public transport for the rest of the traveling, we’re booking as we go.
Because we don’t know anyway AND suspense is fun (we’ve already visited a country we weren’t planning on visiting!), I won’t be revealing our route or destinations until after we actually arrive to each place 😉 So you have to stay tuned!
THE BUDGET
If you haven’t already seen my “Why Teachers Should Travel” post, you should check it out. The traveling we do is not what most people think about when they think vacation, and that post explains a little bit about that difference. Here are some goals we have–I’ll post later on how they go and more tricks that we learn along the way.
Food: <$20 per person on food each day. While we could buy groceries and make our own food for every meal and do it cheaper, we both admit that trying new foods is a HIGH priority for us while traveling, so we’d like to eat out a bit to make sure that we get to try as much as we can. We are planning on having some competitions between each other, and have some travel tricks to stretch meal money I can share in future posts.
Stay: ~$25 a night. While the food goal seems do-able, this goal seems more daunting. From what we’ve seen, hostels don’t seem as cheap as they were once upon a time. We will be staying with some family and friends for a total of a couple weeks, so that should help, but for the rest, we’ll be comparing AirBnBs and hostels.
Transportation: We don’t quite have a budget for this, because other than choosing destinations and times, there aren’t a ton of options. We basically plan on looking for the cheapest of what we can find to get between cities, and planning efficient sight-seeing. It does help a ton to be flexible with times and dates.
Museum/Entrance fees: Maybe ~$5 a day? We won’t be doing things every day with entrance fees (#selfcare #paceyourself), and these fees can vary widely. $5/day allowing rollover might be enough to cover it. We can have goals.
FOLLOW ALONG
If you’re not already following me on Instagram, I’d highly recommend it. You obviously want to subscribe to the blog for these sorts of in-depth posts, but those posts tend to only come once a week (TOPS). By contrast, I am on Instagram daily. You’ll be able to see what we’re doing in real-time via Instagram stories, and I’ll be making it a goal to post photos from travel most days of the week to my feed.
– UPDATE –
I’ve moved all my writing about travel and living abroad to a new blog, called 17 Pockets. If you’re interested in reading more about our adventures and what it’s been like since we moved in September 2017, check it out here!
I really would like to post things that would be helpful to you. So, as you’re reading, if you have questions about travel, moving abroad, or teaching, PLEASE feel free to comment below or email me. The teacher in me wants to provide what people are looking for. I’ve had several people approach me already with questions, and they always make my day. Please don’t be shy!
You might also want to check out…
The backpacks we swear by for this trip:
And:
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