1. Where to go?
Firstly, where do you want to go, be super unrealistic and make a list of all the places you want to go, order them from the most important and then work from there. If you're like me the list is ridiculous, but don't stress you have your entire life to see the world, of course you are not going to see it all in the first few years of your twenties, thirties or whatever. So obviously if you are doing a trip to Europe or Asia or wherever you can group things together and knock them out in the one trip.
2. Time.
Time is really not stressed enough when you read lonely planet books or look at pretty pictures of places you want to go. But it is one of the most important things about your trip. How long do you have? Three weeks and you wanna see 10 countries? Probably not going to happen.
Suss out what you want to do in each place and be realistic about how much time you have there. By being realistic I mean don't spend two days in Paris and expect to see so much. Take waiting in line into consideration(being Aussie, never having lines they are just ridiculous in Europe), hangovers, getting tired, adjusting to time zones, getting to your hotel, getting from place to place and getting lost. Even though cities are quite close in Europe they can take ages for example by train from berlin to prague its about 6 hours... So make sure you are not rushing through each city, I'd suggest for big cities a minimum of 3/4 nights. So you can enjoy the nightlife, have time to recover, see the sites and actually take in what you are seeing and process it.
3. Money
It's what makes the world go round and makes holidays happen. We all need it to travel and we need to keep track of it, unless you are rich, in that case go nuts and I secretly hate you! When preparing for my holiday I budgeted about $100 (Australian) per day just for sights/ food and going out. Then I gave myself a maximum on what I'm prepared to pay for accommodation. Which was about $40 a night. Of course you could do this much cheaper depending on where you go, what you do, and where you stay. I will do another post on how much I spent soon. Now is such a good time for us to see the world as the dollar is so strong, so what are you waiting for, get saving!
So that's a super quick summary of what's to come, I'm almost home, and will try to post here regularly. I really hope this helps and if you have any requests please send emails through to gurtonp@gmail.com
fffades. xo
