Matt and I live for travel, and like to blog about it here! So if you follow our trips at all, you may be wondering about what our day-to-day operations look like on the road. Here are some behind the scenes about our travel style that you may find interesting and helpful.

As much as we hate waiting in lines, airport security checks are unavoidable! (TSA Precheck doesn't work abroad)

We sleep in.

We generally don't leave the hotel/apartment until at least 11:00. (Except for the occasional tour appointment) Traveling for more than a week is a race; it is a marathon not a 100 yard dash. If you try to do too much you will wear yourself and your travel companions out. We always see families that seem to be on third last legs, arguing with each other in some museum. Sleep in! You're on vacation!

We had to be up early for this 9 AM Context Tour of the Acropolis, but that's not our norm.

Coffee

Matt needs coffee before getting going. B&B or hotel breakfasts are perfect for that, but sometimes it’s like $30 per person to add on breakfast! In that case, room service ends up being cheaper because we don’t need a ton of food. More often than not, we end up staying in accommodations like boutique hotels or AirBnBs that don’t have breakfast or room service. In that case, ideally, there is a coffee maker in the room (or at least instant coffee and a kettle). And ideally, that coffee maker has enough coffee for our length of stay. I can’t tell you how many places we stayed that had only enough coffee for maybe one day, yet we were staying for 3-4 days. We came to carrying around instant coffee packets and Nescafe pods, all left over from having to go out and buy some during our stay.

Two low points for Matt include:

We had the wrong size of pods, so he opened up the pod and poured it directly into the hot water, sludge style.
We had no kettle and no real glassware, so Matt used our instant coffee packets with warm tap water and a thin plastic cup.

Work out

This depends on the trip, but on this latest trip, we tried to keep strong with quick morning strength workouts, like the 7-Minute Workout, written about here. Carpet floors of hotels gross me out, so I generally do planks and push-ups, etc on the bed. But an extra towel works too.

At the beginning of the trip, I was able to keep up on this, doing exercises a few times a week, but as the trip wore on, I became less consistent. Whether the room was too small, I didn’t want to do jumping jacks above people in boutique places, or my feet hurt, I got pretty good with excuses.

Blogging

We pass the laptop back and forth for our travel blog. We have to write our notes every day or we will forget, so whenever we have some downtime, we work on it. Before bed or in the morning with coffee works most days. The best time is during train travel.

We don't worry much about grammar or spelling, as it only slows us down. After writing all of our thoughts in our Notes app, with internet available, we copy-paste it into Blogger and start adding photos.

For photos, we plug in each of our devices with pics (both of our phones and our camera) to import everything, then go through and put all photos we want to use into a folder on our desktop. Finally, we upload to Blogger from there.

Like I said, we don't proof read most of our writing there, so once we have the photos in, we post it!

Keeping up with the blog takes a lot of work, and on this longer 6 week trip, I got pretty far behind. I had most of the writing in Notes, but didn’t want to deal with our constant slow internet issues for getting anything posted.

Social Media for Get Out of Town

For Facebook and Twitter, I use Hootsuite to schedule my posts weeks in advance. Before leaving Hamburg on this latest 6 week trip, I scheduled about three weeks of content. This way, I didn’t even have to think about Facebook and Twitter for a couple weeks. I only worried about responding to comments, or sometimes posting something in the moment.

For Instagram, I only post about one photo a day. So at the end of the day or in the morning, I scroll through my phone for the best pic of the day. I sometimes do a quick edit using Snapseed on my phone and then post. Instagram is the platform I spend most of my daily time in interacting with people, so I open it whenever I have time.

I just choose my one favorite photo of the day, do a quick filter on it, and post to Instagram each day while traveling.

Internet

My phone carrier is T-Mobile, so I have unlimited international data. Matt's phone has an international plan on it through work. So luckily, we no longer have to search out SIM cards in each country, which has saved us tons of time and effort.

In addition, when searching for hotels or apartments I always filter for free WiFi. That's a deal breaker. Although, more often than not, the wifi would be either really slow or barely connected. There is nothing more infuriating than wifi that doesn’t really work.

Accommodations

So what other priorities do I look for in our accommodations?

I always use filters for free WiFi, and depending on location/weather, air conditioning.

I try to even out our stays between hotels and Airbnb apartments. We prefer hotels when it's just for 2 nights, but anything more, and we prefer an apartment with a washer/dryer. I try to look at pictures for coffee in the kitchen.

So for example, we stayed in Dresden for 2 nights in a hotel right next to a main square. Next we went to Prague for 3 nights and rented an apartment by the Dancing House (great location, but not in old town) where we had a kitchen and washer/dryer. Next, we stayed with a family member in Nuremberg for 2 nights. Vienna for 2 nights in a central hotel, and Budapest for 4 nights in a AirBnB apartment with kitchen and washer/dryer.

As I include in Plan a Trip in Just 4 Days, we only pack about a week's worth of clothes, so staying in places with laundry available each week, saves us tons of time that would otherwise be spent searching and waiting around in laundromats (learned that over the years). In addition, it's great to have a kitchen available for breakfasts. While we love to go out to restaurants for dinner, being able to pick groceries for breakfast and snacks is so helpful.

We always look for mid-level places. For long trips, luxury accommodations night after night is very expensive, but we also aren’t willing to tough out the cheap places. On this latest trip, we had the worst luck with accommodations. I don’t know if it was because it was the end of the season, where we were, or if was because we were booking last minute, but we had it all, including:

an amazing AirBnB apartment that ended up having bed bugs,
a leaky toilet that made the room smell like mildew,
and a gross hotel that was not as advertised, with mold in the shower and a condom wrapper under the mattress.

How did we get around these issues?

We took pictures and told her about the bugs, booked a fancy hotel down the street, and got refunded some money.
We complained and got moved into a different room while they called the plumber.
After complaining twice and getting moved into a room not much cleaner, we canceled our second night, got a full refund (through hotels.com), and left town a day early to go stay at an awesome farmhouse in the country.

Bags

We each carry a carry-on size backpack. That's it. Matt has a day bag and I have my purse.

We are currently on the search for a versatile backpack that also has rolling capabilities because while backpacks are great for stairs, cobblestone streets, and trains, these bags are feeling pretty heavy!

We aren't budget travelers.

We will pay more for comfort and convenience within reason. We don't stay in the Ritz, nor do we stay in hostels. Our hotel average in Western Europe cities is about $150 per night. Less in smaller towns and in the east, sometimes as low as $60.

We spend most of our money on food, as we like to eat well. We will easily drop $150-200 on a good meal, but will just as happily go somewhere for much cheaper. We mix it up. But either way, we take picture of all of our dinners.

Planning vs winging it

Before leaving Seattle, I mapped out how much time we had with an estimated number of days in each place. Before leaving Hamburg I booked a flight from Rome to London (which is where our flight home is from). So as long as we made it to Rome by that date, we would be good. We were mostly traveling by train, but needed a couple of flights, which I booked along the way.

When traveling for only a couple weeks, I generally have had all hotels and most transportation set up and figured out, so we don't have to stress about it on the road. Because this trip was longer, I experimented with being more flexible, but not completely open. I didn’t want to be carrying our bags around a big city looking for a hotel, so I booked those a couple days or up to a week in advance.

I have mixed feelings about my experience with last minute bookings on this trip. For me, trying to keep up on the travel blog at the same time as trying to plan our trip was too much for me, especially when we were having inconsistent internet. I personally find searching for accommodations to be the most stressful thing because I want to make sure we have a clean, comfortable place to lay our heads at night, so feeling rushed to book these things on the go was not my thing. Plus, the best places were usually already booked. As far as the flexibility goes, I really liked the idea of it, but for the most part, we ended up sticking pretty close to our original plan, so booking ahead of time wouldn’t have changed that experience much for us.

I think I would have enjoyed the flexible travel thing more if I wasn’t also keeping up on a travel blog, we weren’t going to so many places, and/or I had had better luck with accommodations this time around.

Gluten Free

As someone with a gluten sensitivity, finding food that won't give me severe stomach cramps can be stressful. Looking at pictures on Yelp or TripAdvisor can really help because I can see if there are options that look safe.

Many restaurant now label allergens on menus, which is really helpful. But I like to memorize ahead of time how to say "Gluten Free", and use google translate ahead of time to figure out how to say, "I have a gluten allergy. I cannot eat cereals containing wheat. Is this safe for me to eat?" That way, I can just show my note to the waiter if there is confusion.

For the most part, this is rarely much of a problem. The only time it’s tough is when trying to search out quick food because most of the time street food is bread heavy.

What else? Are there more behind the scenes questions you want answered?

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