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| The beautiful couple |
miracle my husband and I had managed to survive fifteen years of marriage ourselves. The wedding coupled with our ability to rationalize just about anything only meant one thing.....we were off to Europe!
We spent months figuring out the best places to go, stay and eat. The list of places we wanted to visit was endless. Brussels or Budapest? Amsterdam or Athens? Lyon or Luxembourg? After much thought and debate we decided on our itinerary:
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| Prague |
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| Rome |
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| Salzburg |
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| Oktoberfest |
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| Tuscany |
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| Amalfi Coast |
We started planning our trip as soon as the lucky couple got engaged in late 2014. (There may also be a slight chance that they only got engaged because they made the mistake of sharing their dream of an Italian wedding with us and we pestered them about when it was going to happen for the better part of two years...)
We booked our airfare and hotels months in advance but there were a couple of other things that we also discovered as we got closer:
Luggage - Packing for 15 days oversees is tough. Add black tie wedding attire and it becomes a challenge. Consider the fact that I'm basically married to Diana Ross when it comes to packing and we were in full fledged crisis mode. There was no way we would be able to manage multiple bags through the various cities not to mention the fact that we would be broke from all of the excess baggage fees on our intra-Europe flights.
To make sure that (a) we both returned from our trip and (b) would hopefully still be married, I enlisted help from Luggage Free.com. It's not cheap (about $5/lb) but was worth it to not have the stress of dealing with everything. We packed our wedding attire and items for the second leg of our trip and let LuggageFree do the rest. They needed five business days to ensure delivery by your desired date so it was a bit weird packing for a trip so far in advance (imagine how Diana Ross felt!).
I scheduled a pickup with them and the guy was there within the 30 minute window I'd been promised. I received email updates when it left the US as well as when it arrived in Italy. When I got to our villa, our bags were waiting for us. We had our wedding attire and a bunch of clean clothes. After the wedding, we packed up our black tie items and dirty clothes and sent them home. It was perfect!
The only hitch came when we returned home. The couple we traveled with on the front half of our trip also used LuggageFree.com. We both had our return luggage picked up from the same hotel. When we returned from Europe we found that we had one of their bags and vice versa. Luckily we live very close to one another so it was not a big deal. It's quite possible that the hotel mixed up something but our names were also clearly marked on each of our bags.
Passports - Our passports were due to expire in March and our trip was in September/October so we never even considered there might be an issue until we randomly happened upon an article about increased passport requirements in some locations. Some countries will not take passports that expire within six months of your arrival so be sure to check each destination location if you are nearing your passport expiration date.
Internet - We contacted our provider prior to leaving and got an international plan. In hindsight, we were glad we had it because there were times where we needed navigation help but most cafes have wifi . It's probably easier to take a break with a glass of wine at a cafe and use their wifi. You can also take an old phone with you and purchase a sim card in Europe which significantly reduces costs. The down side of this is that you have a European number and you don't get your text messages, etc. from your regular phone.
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