The basics of our trip

I thought I'd give you some information on how we planned our trip, in case someone reading this is thinking about going to Europe at some point.

We began by deciding what countries and cities we really wanted to visit. First, it was England (Bath, London…basically as much as we could see of it), France (Paris and the South of France especially Nice), Spain (Barcelona, Seville, Granada, Malaga) and Italy (Venice, Rome, Florence). Were we over doing it? Were our expectations too high? Yes and YES. After little discussion, we realized it was more important to pick a few key cities and spend as much time there as we could. The truly difficult decision of where to visit was made, and our itinerary came together.

Itinerary: Paris (4 days), Seville (2 days), Barcelona (3 days), Venice (4 days), Rome (5 days), Paris (overnight) then home to DC.

We debated over traveling on the Eurorail or flying to and from specific cities. With only about 3 weeks, and looking at the costs of flights versus the Eurorail, we decided to fly. The Eurorail would have been wonderful, had we more time or a less scattered itinerary, because the travel time is longer. It also would have been nice because traveling on a train would allow us to have more views of the countryside and things we may not have seen otherwise. Although, we ended up saving money AND time by flying. But if we were to do a trip to a single country, we definitely would have gone with the Eurorail. We found cheaper airline tickets by searching sites like kayak.com and momondo.com. We also used those sites to find hotels and hostels. As far as where we stay, one of our priorities in a hotel was to have a private bathroom, which in our eyes, was worth the extra cost. Many hostels have shared bathrooms and some have private, and usually hostels are cheaper than hotels. In some cases, we even found that you could find hotels that were about the same price as a hostel with a private bathroom.