Europe 2018 - Part 4
Welcome back! Where to begin with this one... Uhhh, well, here are some lessons learned.
It's impossible to take a 2 week trip to another country and not learn anything. Whether it be facts or history about your destination or lessons you can only learn by doing. By that I mean, when you royally mess up but you're in another country so your only option IS to learn from it. Yep. That was me. It was a tough pill to swallow but what I got from it makes it worth it.
It’s wasn’t all that bad though.
(From left to right: Me, Jorge and Hayley. We were actually just tired from walking those stairs behind us but our facial expressions seemed fitting for lessons learned. ) The next picture was my flight into Lisbon, Portugal. So beautiful.
- For starters, I learned that I can’t sleep on planes. Simple as that. I tried melatonin. I tried ZzzQuil. I tried not sleeping before the flight. I even bought a neck pillow and blanket. Maybe it’s just not in my fate to have the magic ability of getting some shut eye on a massive pill shaped metal can 30 thousand feet in the air. Knowing this, I downloaded plenty of movies to prepare for the 16 hour flight home. (3 hours to Iceland, 4 hour layover, and 8 hours to Dallas)
- You don’t have to have service for the map on your phone to work. Which is actually a great thing! However you have to be careful and make sure it’s updating frequently or you’ll get lost very quick. I have a Samsung Galaxy S9 and I was able to drop pins and locate them without Wi-Fi. I couldn’t name them but if you only drop a few they are pretty easy to identify.
- A good friend of mine that I used to work with traveled frequently and he would always say, “You never truly know a person until you travel together.” This seemed to be a reoccurring theme throughout our trip. Without going too far into detail, we began the trip as a group of five and ended the trip as separate groups of three and two. It took traveling across the world to see some true colors. As for myself, I was in love with this concept because I met a wonderful guy six months ago and that was our second trip together. The first one we drove down to South Padre Island. From Houston, that’s 402 miles away and a six hour drive. We were there for four days and not a single argument. Same went for Europe except it was two weeks! We did have a small fallen out at the very end. The night before we left Paris we didn’t speak to each other at all. The reason was silly and had to do with how we got back to the hotel from the Eiffel Tower that night. I would have preferred our silence not last as long as it did but when you can say you’ve been with a significant other 24/7, for 2 weeks straight, it’s something to be proud of. I was also pleased that we were on the same page for most, if not all, of the trip. Meaning we had similar interests and wanted to do the same things.
- Plan your own trip. Yes, this may seem silly and obvious. But I am not kidding. I told myself, “I am lucky enough to even be here. Don’t get in the way of what they have planned or what they want to do. You are just along for the ride. You’ll enjoy it either way.” NO. Plan your own trip. At the very least, know what you’re getting into. We agreed and paid in advance for an activity before leaving to Europe. Come to find out there are additional fees to this activity. In the end it was more than worth it but it would have been nice to know ahead of time. Next, you’ll absolutely want an input in where you stay. We were staying so far out of three of the cities that it took an hour to two hours to get home each night. Finally, when put in our situation, it made it very awkward getting flight and room information from the person we were no longer speaking to. The picture below is mainly what we had to go off of since we separated groups the first night. I don't know about you but that gives me anxiety: relying on someone to send a screen shot of flight info. There are so many ways that could go wrong. But we managed, I suppose that's what really matters.
- And finally my royal screw up. This also stems from number four. But it was more on me than anything. – All of our flights were bought by our friend except one. The whole trip she had the info and we were together (not together but on the same flight). But this one went to my account and my email and my responsibly. I had assumed it was like the rest, same as theirs. Usually you get an email letting you know that your flight is coming up. I actually got two but I didn't see them because I get so many and only two are displayed on the notification bar. Plus, I was out of town. My email was highly irrelevant to me. Until it wasn't... On the way to the airport the driver asked what terminal. We pulled out our itineraries and that’s when Jorge noticed we missed our 6 a.m. flight. My heart sank and my stomach went into knots. I immediately thought there weren’t going to be any more flights for that day or it would be too expensive. And not only did I screw it up for myself but I had messed it up for him too. He took it surprisingly well though. (No arguments over it. Can you believe that? Boy, am I lucky. :D ) I still feel terrible about it but like I said, when your only option is to learn from it, you just do what you gotta do. There were still flights available, we all sat next to each other and we made it to Paris. That’s all that matters!I hope to continue learning and growing by traveling. My next goal is Japan. But I think Switzerland or Ireland may be more feasible. Speaking of goals, I actually cracked open a journal from awhile back.Monday, March 20th 2017"... I really wish I had a job that allowed me to travel more often. It would be neat to start a vlog or blog about that. In any case, maybe I can work something out like a trip every six months or so."I was ecstatic to read this because for the first time I had a goal and blew it out of the water. Well a trip every six months I'll admit is a stretch but I'd say I hit a solid 2 out of 3 there.
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey!
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