In May 2024 Cherish and me took our longest vacation to visit France and Italy: 19 days! We came back with 537 photos and 27 videos and decided to post them all here for you to view.
Just kidding! Instead of doing that we thought it would be helpful for others that want to visit these two beautiful countries to learn from our travel mistakes. While this blog will focus on some of the mistakes we made I want to be clear that we loved this trip! It was amazing! None of the experiences I am about to share ruined our vacation. As to travel planning mistakes, we made a few so we are breaking this trip into three blogs. What you are reading now is the high-level summary of the trip. Part two will cover France and Part three will cover Italy. We will be including our complete and highly detailed itinerary at the end of part two and part three. Links to the other blogs are included at the end of this blog.
Our High-Level Itinerary:
- Fly from Atlanta, Georgia to Paris, France
- Five Days in France: Normandy and Paris
- Fourteen Days in Italy: Venice, Florence, Rome, Positano, & Naples
- Fly from Naples, Italy to London, England for a five-hour layover then fly home to Atlanta, Georgia.
Our Travel Goals for the trip:
Overall we achieved what we set out to do on this vacation: experience a beautiful part of the world with each other. There were a few guidelines we set out to follow when planning the trip as follows:
- We will not be able to see it all in one trip! Plan fewer things to see and more time to see each thing. This is the best travel advice we can share with everyone reading this.
- Carry-On Only. <Gulp!> Yeah you read that correctly: 19 days, 4 countries, 8 hotels, and NO CHECKED BAGS!
We purchased two Peak Design 45L Travel Backpacks and a few Peak Design Packaging Cubes for the trip. More on that decision later. Here is Cherish showing off the backpack that made the trip:
- Our final goal for the trip: don’t go broke!
I think the hardest part of any vacation is trying to sort out in advance what the trip will cost. The second hardest part is sticking to your budget while on vacation. Especially if you like shopping! Extra costs like shipping items home because they won’t fit in your carry-on are just some of the little expenses that creep up during the journey.
Many of the travel sites we used to plan the trip avoid talking about money and instead focus on the experiences. Including what we spent before leaving, during the vacation, and to get home ended up costing us $15,555.07 which is broken down below. Can you travel to these locations for less? I am sure that you can and we certainly plan to in the future.
Here is what the trip cost:
We did a lot of deal searching to reduce the costs of the one-and-done expenses like Airfare, Car rental, Bus tickets, and Hotels. Since we cannot re-use any of those items we wanted to save as much money as we could. We did not have credit card points to score big on free or upgraded flights. We could not do carry-on only with our existing luggage so we had to buy something else. This pre-vacation spending was a primary factor for why we ended up moving around to eight different hotels to save money. More on that later.
Another cost factor for us was that this was Cherish’s first trip to France and Italy and it was happening during her birthday so we wanted part of it to be extra special. Not “Disney-princess unlimited budget fairytale special” so items like first-class or business class flights were not an option for us, but we did end up booking what in our minds is a very expensive hotel for two nights to celebrate her birthday. Did I mention we made some mistakes along the way…. so those cost us some money as well. We also bought souvenirs including original artwork and a set of glassware for our bar. We also enjoyed wine. And we bought more wine. And we bought even more wine and shipped it home with us. The point here is that while looking at the grand total was a bit of a shell shock it was worth every penny. And most importantly, we achieved our goal and did not go broke. Looking back at the total cost it was more than I thought it would cost, but it was worth every penny.
THANK YOU JENNY!
My cousin Jenny loves planning trips for her family and friends. She was kind enough to provide us with two of the most detailed travel itinerary documents we have ever seen. We will cover those in the next two blogs. We can’t thank her enough for her help in steering us down a successful vacation path.
In addition to Jenny’s travel plans we spent weeks watching YouTube videos about traveling. We loved the content produced by https://www.youtube.com/@awaytogether and https://www.youtube.com/@LesFrenchiesTravel and highly recommend these two sources when planning your next adventure.