richard-light-of-heart-blog

[richard-light-of-heart-blog]

Prologue...

Guess I should go a little more in depth of what I’m trying to keep track of here, how I got here, and the point of this Tumblr. at least for my sake. About a year ago I started thinking about how much fun it would be to go on a backpacking trip across Europe. I’ve never traveled outside the states before and really haven’t traveled a lot in the states either. I had been working at in customer service for a major cellular tech company (I don’t know if I should mention which one... we’ll revisit that later) for 3 years at that point and as I’m sure you can imagine I Fucking HATED it. Don’t get me wrong, the pay was great, good benefits (especially for a 20 year old when I started), the people I worked with were great, and I feel like the company definitely tried its best to take care of their employees, but ya know... customer service, amiright? especially for a cellular/tech company. I initially took on the job because I was putting myself through college and they offered tuition assistance. they’d give me an extra $8,000 (USD) per year ($4,000/semester) in order for me to go to school if I was studying something tech/business related. “Perfect!” young, naive me thought. I’ll be able to make good money and earn my degree without going into a huge amount of debt. I had a few scholarships, but they weren’t covering all the costs I needed for school including textbooks and just normal cost of living for rent and food. I was already working 3 part-time jobs to help put myself through and figured only doing one would be a lot easier. 1< 3 quick maths! easy. But here’s why I say I was young and naive. Sure I was good at the job, nailed all the interviews over the phone and in person ranked as one of the top representatives consistently, but the job itself was incredibly taxing on my mental health and a big stress increase for my already stressed out life. I won’t go into the details of it, but I’m sure you can imagine or have experienced working in a service position where there are a ton of customers who are just flat out assholes. Yelling at people who are there to literally solve your problems and can’t seem to treat those in service industries as actual human beings or even simply separate them from the company they might have an issue/misunderstanding with. And I intentionally used the word misunderstanding because a lot of the times the customer has been given all the information about their service upfront and just completely ignore or are too stupid/stubborn to understand what they agreed to. now to be fair on the customers’ end sometimes the company does fuck up, but again that is the whole reason we have the customer service field is to help fix those issues. I digress... Anyway, I had to get out of that job and started planning on how/when I could do it the best way possible. I had already a pretty decent amount of money saved for someone my age now 23 at this time. I figured in order for me to take the trip that I truly wanted I would need to save up about $10,000 to enjoy it comfortably. Now you’re probably thinking, “$10,000 what kinda trip is this?!?” and to be fair I like to be overly prepared for just about any kind of journey I set out on. Basically, I’ve always wanted to backpack across Europe for a full three months. Travel as much as I could, see as much as I could, meet as many people and experience as much of their culture as I could. I figured I should try to do it now while I’m still young and actually had the means to do it. I started by making a list of all the places I wanted to see. Here’s that list btw. London, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Nice, Cinque Terre, Florence, Rome, Vatican city, Venice, Switzerland (nowhere specifically at first), Munich, Dubrovnik, Athens, Santorini, Cyprus, Istanbul, Budapest, Vienna, Kraków, Prague, Berlin, Copenhagen, Oslo, Amsterdam, Ireland (again nowhere specifically), and Scotland (you get the idea). Basically, it was the list compiled by https://thesavvybackpacker.com plus a few more countries/cities thrown in. Honestly, I definitely wouldn’t have felt comfortable going on this trip or preparing for it without the help of their website so I have to give them big props here! As I’m sure you can see I had some pretty optimistic ideas of how long I’d be able to travel, spend time at each location, and travel to and from each destination. I definitely had to go back to the drawing board a few times and narrow down which of these places I’d be able to see efficiently and actually have enough time in each of the cities I really wanted to be in without having to get an extended visa. (not even sure how to go about that tbh) I had to take out a lot of cities I wanted to see out of the equation. My final list and actual itinerary came down to this: London, Paris, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Nice, Cinque Terre, Florence, Rome, Venice, Interlaken, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam, The Hague, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and back to London again. Pretty much had to cut out all of Dubrovnik, Greece, Cyprus, Istanbul, Copenhagen, and Oslo. I had to make those changes for a lot of reasons; mainly because of cost and time. having Dubrovnik added in made things much more complicated. The travel time alone would've added a whole additional day to my schedule for both getting to and from there. Greece and the subsequent islands also had to be cust due to the fact of how much time and money it would take for me to travel between each of them. Figure I'll need to just plan a separate trip to really go and enjoy Greece and the Mediterranean islands in the future. So with my list of cities complete, I figured how many days I would like to spend at each, factored in travel time, and made sure to keep it under the 90day period you can travel throughout Europe with a standard US passport. and then it was just a matter of figuring out what to bring and counting down the days.