Advice by mia

This trip hasiybop3been a huge adventure and we all learned a lot. Is someone else were to decide to do a trip like this, here is some things I would tell them. C

First off all, the trick for survival is to break it up. If you just go from city to city looking at awesome stuff, everything you see will start to blur together and you wont remember any of it. Break up the trips to the city with camping or to the beach or something relaxing in nature to clean the slate. Otherwise the vacation will turn into work and won't be any fun at all.

In our trip we tried to go relax in every country, depending on the intensity of the sightseeing we were doing, but toward the end when we were speeding around Europe, we only had time to hit the Swiss Alps for a day or two and it wasn't enough. I can barely remember where we went and most of the stuff we saw I have forgotten already. We were pretty good about taking breaks at most of the other places, though.

Another thing is about planning. It's about the balance between spontaneity and planning. It helps to book hotels and rent cars ahead of time, but not plan every second of ever day. It's fun to just scratch things off The List at the last second. When we were in Paris we decided at the last second that we didn't want to go to the Louvre. It's kind of a good reminder that The List actually can be changed. An example of an unplanned disaster was the beginning of our stay in New Zealand. We ended up blowing a fortune on hotels while we tried to find a rental, and wasted a ton of time. It's also fun just to get lost sometimes and wander through the cute alleys in Europe.

The last piece of advice I have is to record the trip somehow. A year is a really long to travail and, trust me, by the end of it you will not be able to remember any of it without help. Write a diary, or a blog ( like us!) and take a ton of pictures. Any unrecorded memory will be lost forever!

So there you go, the only other thing is to pack light because you don't want to carry a ton of stuff. Also, pack in backpacks because it's hard to drag suitcases with wheels over cobbles. Whoever you are, good luck on your trip and I hope all this helped! We had a lot of fun, maybe not as much when we were actually there as now that its over, though!