Last summer I travelled for 3 months through Europe and it was one of the best experiences of my life. You might be planning your own trip or it might just be an idea niggling in the back of your brain, so I’m here to help you budget by telling you exactly how much I spent on everything! Read more
Over the course of 12 weeks I spent less than £200 on accommodation in fairly pricey Europe.
Had I accepted to pay the average hostel fee of £15 per night for all 86 nights of my trip, I would have spent £1290. So, how did I do it? And more importantly, how can you?
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Perched on a stone step in a Roman amphitheatre, the murmur of thousands of voices enveloped us as they joined the cast in singing the Hebrew Slave Chorus, crescendoing into a tremendous, lilting sound…
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“Was there something wrong with the apples?” she asked bluntly, holding out one of the half eaten fruits she’d retrieved from the compost bin. We babbled something about the core not being good to eat but we’d clearly left a fair bit more than that. “Is it normal,” she asked, “to throw that much away where you’re from?” She took out a sharp knife, quartered the apple and removed the slivers of its core and seeds. “That’s all you need to cut out – look how much fruit there is still to eat. See, for us, we know how much energy and water and time it took for this one apple to grow, so to only eat so little and throw the rest away, it’s just crazy.”
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Bugs have no sense of personal space. This is probably the #1 lesson I learned on the farm. I was naive in my expectations: I thought I would be all
8AM. Crouched in a narrow dirt walkway between two beds of hay, with the sun beating down on the back of my neck and flies ricocheting off the sweat plastering my forehead, I dug gloved fingers into the soil and dropped four agonizingly tiny seeds into the shallow hole. We’d been working for over an hour, planting daikon in the fields of a farm in the mountains, 40km outside of Bologna.
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We were in the back seats of a minivan being driven by someone we’d never met, the roads leading further and further out of the city…
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Sat in the middle of a demolished football field-turned-community garden and skate park, we ate vegan pizza, fresh out of an outdoor stone oven and drank wine with a complete stranger. This was our first evening of our travels, in Zürich, Switzerland.
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Bienvenue a Paris!
We dove straight into the deep end on our first day (and oh my, how by the end of the day I would have loved to dive into the river Seine, a fountain, a puddle…). Woke up in London, went to sleep in Zürich and trekked through Paris in-between. Paris was lovely – we unashamedly took the role of tourists, taking cringeworthy selfies in front of the Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower; you’ll be pleased to hear a selfie stick was not part of our essential packing list, although the wandering pack of vendors at the Eiffel Tower seemed to think otherwise – thank goodness they could see from our hiking bags that we wouldn’t have room for a miniature tower souvenir.
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Having prepared myself mentally and logistically for this trip for months, I did not anticipate our very first train to be cancelled. We were scheduled to take the 18:01 Eurostar on Tues 23 June, the day the French activists chose to protest in Calais – setting fire to tyres and even damaging the railroad tracks
All Eurostar services were cancelled.
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