How To Travel To Europe This Summer

We somewhat spontaneously took a trip to Europe. Everything the newspapers say is true and NOT true at the same time. We ended up having a relatively uneventful trip after a lot of worrying, but your mileage may vary.

Check Your Flight

We made a flight. We congratulated ourselves. We planned the trip. Six days before we were set to leave, we checked our flight due to all of the news articles out there about canceled flights. And ours had a big, red canceled notice on it. No one notified us. If we hadn’t checked, we would not have known this was the case. So first bit of advice: check your flights daily leading up to the trip, and keep up with the news for where you’re going. We also checked our return flight every day of the trip, but that one remained scheduled. Huge sigh of relief.

Things Will Take a Long Time

Or maybe they won’t. But go into it thinking it will take a long time. We downloaded a few audiobooks for stories I already knew by heart. This gave me something to listen to while we were in line or waiting. Choosing something happy that didn’t tax my brain gave me an opportunity to mentally escape. Things we thought would go quickly didn’t. Things we thought would take a long time didn’t. You never know.

Travel Insurance

We were probably able to keep calm in some situations knowing that we had travel insurance. Even if you don’t end up needing it, it’s well worth the cost for the peace of mind.

Think Before You Pack

Pack as much as you can in carry on. We packed a lot of our clothes in carry on, and anything that would be difficult not to have for the first few days. Bring extra medications in case you get stuck. We had watched friends deal with missing luggage via stories on Facebook, and we saw the pictures of Heathrow with the suitcases piled up. We made a spreadsheet of everything packed and took photos so we knew which bag contained which items. We also made an audio recording as we packed, talking out what was in each suitcase. We didn’t end up needing these photos and audio files, but they would have been handy to have if things didn’t work out.

Fly Direct

If you can, fly direct. Every story I hear about missing luggage includes a connecting flight.

BYOM

Bring your own masks and tests. We masked everywhere — any time we were outside the hotel room, including outside while we walked around. (Yes, we have lovely mask tans.) We didn’t eat at restaurants. We brought our own breakfast and lunch and did takeaway for dinner. It worked well because the weather was nice. We brought tiny crackers and granola bars for the flight that we could eat without removing our masks. We brought reusable straws and a sponge so we could drink without removing our masks. We took COVID seriously because it’s still serious. No one gave us grief for wearing a mask or looked at us strangely, but only 10 – 20% of people were still masking. We came home COVID-free, though we’re continuing to test.

Buy Tickets Beforehand

Even better, if you’re going to multiple sites, see if they’re connected by a common membership pass. We were able to get a year membership to one place that allowed us to enter five different museums/sites. This gave us a place to call if we were having trouble getting in that day. Plus we got perks such as going back to the Tower at night for the Ceremony of the Keys, which was held for members only.

That’s all the advice I have to give. Would we do it again? Probably. If we hadn’t purchased the tickets before everything started to go downhill, we probably would have delayed the trip. But once we had the tickets, we decided to go full-steam-ahead and we’re glad we went. Even happier that things worked out and we’re home again.

Our heart goes out to people weathering the heat wave right now. We had warm days while we were there, but nothing like what is going on right now.