Europe 2023: Epic Honeymoon and Last Long International Trip?

WE’RE MARRIED!

We got married on Friday, June 9, 2023 — which was our ten year dating anniversary! We’ve already had so many amazing experiences in our first ten years together, and we can’t wait to see what the next chapter holds for us.

The Honeymoon

First up on our married-life agenda is heading out on our honeymoon! We left 3 days after the wedding to fly to Europe for an epic 10-week adventure.

This will be our 6th multi-month International trip since semi-retiring in 2018. Although our last trip where we traveled all around the world will be hard to top, our honeymoon trip should be the best one yet! It will also undoubtedly be the most expensive.

Here are recaps of our prior long international trips for reference, along with my average cost per day for my half of the expenses:

• 5 Months Traveling Around the World in 2018 – $37/day
• 4 Months Traveling Around Europe in 2019 – $46/day
• 2 Months Traveling Around Mexico in 2021 – $52/day
• 10 Weeks Traveling Around Latin America in 2022 – $85/day
• 9 Weeks Traveling Around the World in 2022 – $143/day

A couple things to note from the trips above: each trip has gotten progressively more expensive and generally shorter in length. There are reasons for both of these.

Although the trips we took in 2018 and 2019 were amazing, especially since traveling internationally was so new to us, they were too long. We started to get pretty fatigued after a few months of non-stop travel and enjoyed the second half of those trips less than the first half. Since then, the shorter 8-10 week trips have been much better for us, and that length seems to be the sweet spot. They’re long enough that we’re feeling ready to come home at the end, but not so long that we lose the excitement of visiting new places.

Shorter trips cost more on a per day basis though due to having less time to stay in each country, which means flying more from place to place, and thus higher costs from plane tickets. That doesn’t account for the full discrepancy in trip costs though. As we’ve traveled more, we are much less willing to sacrifice on things like accommodations and food. In 2018 and 2019, we’d stay at hostels or rooms in houses (Airbnb) to save money, even if it meant a less enjoyable stay. That’s no longer the case, as we now much prefer to have our space and privacy by renting an entire unit on Airbnb or a hotel room. We’re also much more willing to pay more money from a more comfortable experience. If a 1 PM flight costs $100 more than a 7 AM flight, we’ll pay the extra every time now, whereas on the first couple of trips we were very focused on keeping a tight budget.

We’re fortunate that both our incomes and net worth have increased significantly since those original long international trips, which gives us the ability to spend more without worrying as much. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t give me a little anxiety that our most recent trip cost nearly 4x as much as the first trip on a per day basis though. And this trip is probably going to cost even more than that! This could be our last long international trip like this though before having kids, so being comfortable and having a good experience is more important than cost. As long as we’re able to at least break even while working online during this trip, then we’ll be in great shape.

Trip Outline

After the issues we had planning out everything and then having to cancel everything (and lose a lot of money) for our Latin America trip in 2020, we learned our lesson. We’re much more careful about booking non-refundable things too far in advance than we were on our first couple of long trips. We have a general outline and plan for everywhere we want to go, but so far we only have the first month of the trip booked. We’ll gradually book the rest of the trip as we go.

Right now, here’s the plan:

• Switzerland: ~2.5 weeks
• Liechtenstein: day trip from Zurich
• Slovenia: ~5 days
• Latvia: ~5 days
• Estonia: ~5 days
• Finland: ~1 week
• Sweden: ~1.5 weeks
• Norway: ~ 1.5 weeks
• Denmark: ~1.5 weeks

In total, we plan to be gone for about 10 weeks, coming back at the end of August.

If this seems like a random assortment of countries, well, it is. We’ve wanted to visit Switzerland and the Nordic countries for years but have skipped them in past trips due to cost. It’s very hard to spend any length of time in these countries on a budget. Now that budget is less of a concern, and we might not be taking any more long trips in the near future, now is the time. Slovenia we were originally supposed to have gone to on our 2019 trip, but had to skip it due to time constraints and visa issues within the Schengen region. So we really wanted to hit that one this trip on our way up to the Nordic countries. Then Lativa and Estonia we really don’t know much about, but they were easy stops on the way from Slovenia to Finland, and we had extra time so they seemed like perfect countries for a slight detour. We really wanted to squeeze in Iceland as well, but just couldn’t figure out a reasonable way to do it with flights. Flights to and from Europe this summer are much more expensive (both dollar value and point cost) than when we’ve gone in the past. Adding in Iceland using points wasn’t feasible and it’s another very costly country, so we’ll have to save it for a future trip. It would be a great one to do on its own and give ample time to explore.

We’ve never been to any of these countries before, so we’re very excited to check them out and explore. After this trip we will have been to more than 50 countries, which is a lifetime goal of mine!

Trip Goals

The only goals on this trip are to keep up with the day to day website operations on Fifth Wheel PT and Travel Therapy Mentor to earn enough while traveling to cover the cost of the trip and to have a great experience as newlyweds. Traveling is always at least a little stressful, but I really want to keep stress to a minimum, even if it means spending more, to have a good time. I’ll be tracking all of my expenses like usual as we go along in order to update you all when we get back.

We’ve done a good job so far this year getting ahead on content for the websites, so maintaining while we’re gone shouldn’t be a big issue. Traveling also means spending a lot of time on planes and in airports where we’ll hopefully be able to squeeze some work in as we go. We also try to plan an extra day in each place we go to rest, recover, and get caught up on work.

Recommendations

If you’ve been to any of the countries on our planned itinerary above and have recommendations, let me know in the comments! We’ve talked to many friends and followers about places to go, but we’re always open to learning more and hearing about the experiences of others.

Whitney will be posting pictures regularly on our Instagram if you’d like to follow along with our adventures! We should have some epic pictures especially in Switzerland and Norway!