*Traveling as a family of 3 with our 12 yr old son.*

Not long ago we returned from our INCREDIBLE European adventure. We spent just over a month traveling through some beautiful places in Western Europe, and I think it was the perfect itinerary! A mix of city and country, inland and coastal towns with Mediterranean beaches and even some Scottish highlands and lochs. This was our idea of the perfect vacation.

Now I should tell you, I am ALL about the planning. I love to plan holidays, even though it can be overwhelming in the beginning with where to start and knowing what to do or where to go, I love the research phase. I am the girl with spreadsheets, apps… ALL the things. It’s part of the joy of travel for me. So all of this trip, I organised myself. I understand that this is absolutely not everyones jam, so don’t worry, I’ve got your back to help you plan your next adventure, wherever it may be.

In this blog I’ll be sharing our 30 day itinerary, recommended accommodation, plus a bunch of tips and tricks on how to organise your trip and some things you need to remember. It doesn’t actually matter where you’re going, the methodology of how to build your trip is the same.

So let’s get started. I’m going to cover how to build your itinerary and choosing where to go, our 30 day itinerary with recommended accommodation, Travel Tips & Tricks including great Travel Apps to download before you go.

choosing where to go / build your itinerary

Europe is huge with SO much variety that I believe the absolute hardest part is deciding where to go as there are literally countless options of amazing places to visit. For us, we were going on a family vacation (my husband and I plus our 12yr old son) and we really love nature and history, so we wanted an itinerary that spoke to us personally. We could have easily done any number of versions of our itinerary and added other places and it still would have been amazing - I think there really are no bad options.
BUT, how you plan your trip and putting extra thought into the kind of holiday you want is really important. Do you want to lay on the beach? Do you want big cities with culture and shows? Do you want to explore ancient ruins or visit vineyards? Maybe you want to do a little bit of each, which is totally doable. Most importantly, think about the PACE you want to have for your trip. If you don’t want to to really rushed, then I suggest sacrificing the number of places you want to visit for being able to take things a little slower. Which is what we did. Instead of trying to fit 10 countries in to 30 days, we chose 4 main areas / countries with the idea we could spend roughly a week in each: We chose London, France, Italy & Scotland.

Our 30 Day Europe Itinerary for uk, france & italy

First up, here is our itinerary outline that I used to share with my instagram audience and put in to our travel journals. I use Canva to create these types of graphics and it’s great - really easy to use too. When I got home I replaced the stock images I’d used with our own to personalise it. Having an outline is the best place to start, then you can move into organising in more detail.

Below this is the REAL itinerary where you get to see how my brain works - and how much I love excel for travel planning! 😂

On the excel spreadsheet I just started with dates, and then broke down into days / nights and added more and more detail as I booked things.

We absolutely loved our itinerary and everything we did. This was the first time both my husband and son had been to the Europe and UK, so I wanted to take them to all of my favourite places. The only place new for me was Scotland, which was an amazing experience for us all. The trip was a great mix of seeing the bigger cities with hustle and bustle and so much to see and do, with relaxing and quiet(er) places. I planned it so that following each huge busy city, we had somewhere quiet following. The South of France was such a lovely slow pace after being in London & Paris, and likewise, the Cinque Terre was welcome after Nice & Venice and preparing us for Rome! Although, the Cinque Terre is very popular, but still a relaxed vibe. Rome was the busiest, hottest place we went, but we followed it up with 10 night in Scotland which was truly magical with so much space to roam.

ACCOMMODATION planning recommendations

Accommodation is one of the biggest expenses when you travel. We chose middle the road options. We certainly could have gone cheaper, but are at the age we didn’t want to compromise comfort. I have done the backpacking thing and am beyond that now. I do a LOT of research when looking for accommodation, reading many reviews and even going to google maps to street view the locations so I know they are in a good spot. Booking.com is my favourite website for booking accommodation although I occasionally use AirBnB as well. I create a seperate tab on the spreadsheet where I have all of our accommodation listed, including booking confirmation, pricing and if breakfast was included. I will happily share the result of all my research below but have removed the two places we stayed that I would not recommend. Everywhere else is recommended, those with a rating of 5 were absolutely incredible and very special at what I thought was a reasonable rate. A rating of 4 was still really really good, just something could have been better (for example, in Rome, if the room was a little bigger it would have been perfect - so quirky and fun! And in Vernazza, Cinque Terre, the apartment was AMAZING with a rooftop terrace - but noisy at night). I’ve also included where I booked through to help you find them.

Travel Tips & Tricks

Pre Booking Attractions & Transport

*Harry Potter World, book well in advance*

I always pre book attractions for two reasons - a lot of the major ones sell out months in advance, or saving time in line. For example, if you want to go to Harry Potter World in London or do the Harry Potter Express (Jacobite Steam Train), you simply have to book well in advance. At the Louvre, you can go and stand in line for a ticket - but you will be there for HOURS. We paid a little extra for skip the line tickets, and it was well worth it. For HP world & the train, we booked around 3 months in advance, for the Louvre, about 2 weeks. There are a lot of queues / lines in Europe at big sites, so being prepared with a little research is going to be really helpful and ‘Skip the Line’ tickets are great. You pay a little more but are get to choose an arrival time which is so convenient when you’re traveling and have lots to see and do. Places we went that I would recommend buying tickets for in advance:
Harry Potter World, Jacobite Steam Train, The Colosseum (there are plenty of tours but be careful, we got duped on Viator), The Louvre (Skip the Line), Vatican City (Skip the Line).

Trains / busses and trains between cities and towns within Europe I leave until a little later, but I still book in advance. You can rock up and get tickets on many of the trains, but for the popular routes where you need a seat reservation - it could be fully booked up. We decided not to risk it. I started booking the biggest routes first and combined booking where possible. ie. in Italy, I booked our train from Venice to La Spezia and La Spezia to Rome on one booking.
Recommended booking sites we used are below. Do price check as there are lots of sites selling tickets at inflated rates.

ItaliaRail & Omio for Italy
SNCF & Omio for France
Scotrail for Scotland
National Rail for UK (regional trains)
Rail Europe is also a trusted site, but not always the cheapest.

Money & Communication

The biggie! We all want to be able to share our IG stories and stay in touch with loved ones easily when overseas without paying huge roaming rates. There are a few different options, you can get a local SIM when you arrive, or get an esim which I don’t know much about but you can google to find out more. I got a local SIM in London as soon as I landed from EE and it was absolutely perfect. The one I got was around 30 pounds / 60 NZD for 500gb data for 30 days and some texting and calling allowed for as well. I was mostly just concerned about data. I told those close to me at home the new number and put a voicemail on my NZ number to contact me via email. Perfect! EE are a service provided and have stores all over the place, and at Heathrow.
The other issue I lost sleep over was money. I really didn’t want to be carrying around a bunch of cash, and I didn’t want to be stung with heavy fees while trying to spend overseas or withdraw money. In the past I have just used a combination of getting cash out in country with my eftpos card and paid the $8 each time and used my credit card the rest of the time. But there is a better way! I researched travel cards and found a few, with the best overall seeming to be a Wise Card.
I had a wise account already for doing overseas banking transactions, and it seemed like it would work perfectly - and it did.
The major benefits are: 1. you can load money into different currencies at todays rate, OR, if you are not sure what the rate is doing, just leave the money in your NZ currency and it will take from there when you spend overseas. I liked loading different amounts into pounds and Euro’s so I could track a little more. 2. There is a really handy app for viewing transactions, loading and transferring funds. 3. You can can also load into Apple Pay. It’s just like a regular credit card but with VERY low fees. Amazing! You can sign up HERE, and receive a free transfer of up to 500GBP. Note that I get a kick back when you spend your first $175. Also notes that we used our card and I recommended it before their referral link came available :)

Recommended Handy Travel Apps

Visit my dedicated blog on Recommended Travel Apps - my top tips of must have apps for navigation, currency, itinerary building and transportation apps plus more.