When I realized that my father was really going to send me on a trip, I was overwhelmed. I'd traveled long distances, but never just for fun, and never outside of North America. Although I felt confident to plan a cross country move on a very small budget, I didn't know if I could manage to arrange a trip. I was also afraid that it would take a lot of time.

Fortunately, my father's travel agent had included the catalogues of several tour companies, and these helped to make my trip more real. I looked through several catalogues, but kept returning to the one for Contiki. Their tours are aimed at 18-35 year olds, and seemed to meet my needs much better than tours aimed at retirees.

I checked them out online, and it seemed like a good deal. They covered most of the basic expenses, but they left you free to wander around on your own for some of the time as well. And their tours went to a lot of places that I had imagined myself visiting.

The trick with a tour, I decided, was not to look at it as the only time I would visit the cities. It would be more like a sample, where I could taste just a little bit, and come back later to have more of the places I liked. This was a great attitude for the trip, and I ended up seeing a lot of things that I would have missed if I'd been rushing around between all the famous sights. The things I remember most clearly have more to do with the times I just wandered around cities and happened upon things than with the times I went somewhere I had planned to go.

This is a picture of a latin band that happened to start playing while I was eating my lunch in the park below
Montmartre in Paris. Since I hadn't made any specific plans, or purchased any expensive tickets, I decided to
stay there and enjoy the band until they were through.

I chose my tour with an eye to getting as much as I could with the time and money I had available. For the most part, I flipped through the catalogue over and over, waiting to see which trips really grabbed me. I found several that looked good, and ranked them in terms of which ones I liked best.

I decided on the cities I definitely wanted to visit--London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome. Then I picked out cities that I wouldn't mind missing this time around--Barcelona, Munich, Venice. I looked for a tour that would give me all of what I really wanted, and also a lot of what I just mildly wanted.

Contiki offers what they call "budget" and "superior" tours. The tour I took was one of the "superior" ones, where you stay in good hotels, and get fed in restaurants. The "budget" tours stay in special Contiki campgrounds. From what I could tell, the cost difference was negligible, but you got to stay longer on the "budget" tours. But since I didn't have longer, it made good sense for me to choose a "superior" tour.

I finally picked the "European Encounter." In eighteen days, I would be whisked from London to Amsterdam, the Rhine Valley, Switzerland, Austria, Venice, Rome, Florence, Nice, Lyon, and Paris. By the time I got home, my head was spinning, and I still could hardly believe I had really travelled to Europe.

If the tour you choose doesn't have everything that you want (the tour I picked didn't actually leave any time to see London, although that's where it began and ended!), see about adding on days. I chose to go to London two days early, and saw the city before the tour began.

Questions and Feedback
Travel Links

I wasn't the only one who decided to relax. Here's a group of people taking a siesta, in Nice. (And you can see my sarong in the foreground. It was a very useful beach towel/park blanket that day!)