In May 2024 Cherish and me took our longest vacation to visit France and Italy: 19 days! We came back with 537 photos and 27 videos and decided to post them all here for you to view.
Just kidding! Instead of doing that we thought it would be helpful for others that want to visit these two beautiful countries to learn from our travel mistakes. And since there were a lot of them we are breaking this trip into three blogs. What you are reading now is the high-level summary of the trip. Part two will cover France and Part three will cover Italy.
Our Itinerary
- Fly from Atlanta, Georgia to Paris, France
- 5 Days in France: Normandy and Paris
- 14 Days in Italy: Venice, Florence, Rome, Positano, & Naples
- Fly from Naples, Italy to London, England for a 5-hour layover then fly home to Atlanta, Georgia.
Our Goals
- We can’t see it all in one trip! Plan fewer things to see and more time to see each thing.
- Carry-On Only. <Gulp!> Yeah you read that correctly: 19 days, 4 countries, 8 hotels and NO CHECKED BAGS!
We purchased two Peak Design 45L Travel Backpacks and a few Peak Design Packaging Cubes for the trip. More on that decision later. Here is Cherish showing off the backpack that made the trip.
- Don’t go broke!
Our travel budget is different than your travel budget. I’m sharing this information because family and friends have danced around asking about it since we returned, but I think the topic of cost is worth being direct about. Including what we spent before leaving, during the vacation, and to get home ended up costing us $15,145.37. Can you travel to these locations for less? I am sure that you can and we certainly plan to in the future.
Ask anyone about the cost of travel and you will find tips on saving money on the one-and-done expenses like Airfare, Car rental, Bus tickets, Hotels, and even Food. You won’t be re-using any of those items so it’s good to plan to save as much as you can. In my mind the total cost of a vacation also includes how much is spent on other items like the clothing you buy before you travel. If this is your first trip abroad luggage can be another expense. In our case we couldn’t do carry-on only with our existing luggage so we had to buy something else. My point is that we made a lot of purchases to be ready to take the trip. These pre-trip costs included clothing, luggage, and travel accessories. We chose to buy items that will continue to be useful for future travel so we consider these solid travel purchases, but they still cost money. This pre-vacation spending had a direct impact on decisions like where to stay when we arrived which is why we ended up moving around to 8 different hotels. More on that later.
Another cost factor for us was that this was Cherish’s first trip to France and Italy and it was happening during her birthday so we wanted it to be special. Not “Disney-princess fairytale special” so items like first-class or business class flights were not an option for us, but we did end up booking what in our minds is a very expensive hotel for two nights to celebrate her birthday. Did I mention we made some mistakes along the way…. so those cost us some money as well. And we bought souvenirs including original artwork and a set of glassware for our bar. We also enjoyed wine. And we bought more wine. And we bought even more wine and shipped it home with us. All that to say we did not go broke, but looking back at the total cost it was more than I thought it would cost, but I also know that we have plans to go back and the next time we head back it will be less expensive thanks to the experience we gained on this trip.
THANK YOU JENNY!
My cousin Jenny loves planning trips for her family and friends. She was kind enough to provide us with two of the most detailed travel itinerary documents we have ever seen. We will cover those in the next two blogs. We can’t thank her enough for her help in steering us down a successful vacation path. In addition to Jenny’s travel plans we spent weeks watching YouTube videos about traveling. We loved the content produced by https://www.youtube.com/@awaytogether and https://www.youtube.com/@LesFrenchiesTravel and highly recommend these two sources when planning your next adventure.