Beard & Broad Do Europe!

We were very excited to get married after 8 years of dating but we may have almost been slightly more excited to go on a honeymoon. We love traveling together. One of the first things we did after we decided to get serious was take a road trip along Route 66 from Los Angeles to Cleveland.  Many couples probably would have wanted to kill each other, we wanted to do it all over again.  We’ve been a ton of places in the US since then and only traveled once out of the country together. We knew early on that for our honeymoon we wanted to go plan a long, memorable adventure a bit out of our comfort zone.

WHERE
Deciding where we wanted to go wasn’t easy at first. We have huge travel ambitions and want to go EVERYWHERE. We are both not the type to want to sit on a beach for a week and do nothing. We like waking up early and exploring new places while eating, drinking, learning and seeing everything we can.

We have a strong interest in going to Central and South America, especially Costa Rica (hello sloths!) But we ultimately decided on not honeymooning there because we think traveling to Central or South American with friends would be a whole lot better. Especially since we have friends who have been there before, and head to South America often.

We then quickly decided on Europe, but the problem was narrowing down the countries we wanted to see. Traveling inside Europe is super easy with cheap flights and the rail system. Beard’s first ideas were Paris and Belgium and Broad’s ideas were Spain and Portugal. We discussed it with our travel agent (more on her in a bit) and decided that the perfect honeymoon trip for us would be Paris, Brussels & Amsterdam.

We think its important to note that Broad had NO DESIRE to go the Paris (yes, you read that right). She thought it would be a bit uppity, overrated, expensive and very touristy. It took some convincing from Beard and reassurance from our travel agent to convince her that we needed to add it to our trip.

WHEN
After the wedding, but not right after the wedding. If we can offer one piece of wedding/honeymoon advice its that you should not go on your honeymoon the day after your wedding. You will need time to decompress and take it all in that you are now married (and cash wedding present checks)! We decided to go the Thursday after the wedding which was perfect. We had time to hang out with out of town guests, open presents, take care of our honeymoon fund and pack.

HOW
We are usually good on planning our trips. We like Airbnbs, cheap motels, we read reviews, do our research and we’re good at figuring out locations and directions. We knew for a trip like this, we should consult an expert. We turned to Eva at Epic Experiences! We first became acquainted with her last year when our friends Amanda and Matt had a destination wedding in Mexico. They coordinated the trip through her and she made our first Mexico trip so easy! We really enjoyed working with her, so we immediately emailed her to see if she could help plan our trip. She responded quickly and excitedly agreed!

We contacted Eva before we narrowed down our destinations. We spent a few calls with her, going over all the countries we wanted to see and her suggestions before we decided upon Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. Per her suggestion, we made arrangements to fly into Paris, take the train to Brussels, then take the train to Amsterdam and flying out from there.

Eva planned our flights and booked our hotels. We told her exactly what we wanted (she refused to let us book cheap motels!) and she found the perfect hotels in the best locations. She planned a few excursions for us but we had mostly an open schedule so we could be flexible while touring. Eva was always available by phone or email when we had questions, and believe us we had A LOT of questions.

We cannot say enough about how amazing it was to use Eva to plan our trip! Nowadays, we kinda forget that travel agents exist. And before using her, we actually didn’t realize that you don’t actually pay them, they’re paid by the hotels and such that they use to organize your trip.  Sure, it’s easy to just do some quick internet searches, but it was amazing and so helpful to talk to someone who has been to all these places and could offer first hand knowledge of the pros and cons. It was especially great to have someone take care of planning all the hard stuff like flights and hotels (and she also helped when we had a luggage fiasco after landing in Paris). We cannot stress hard enough to consult with a travel agent (namely Eva) before planning your next big trip. You will be so happy you did!

In order to fully explore all the cool stuff we did in each country, (and to not make this post super long) we’ll do a separate recap for each of them. So please stay tuned for more on our trip. Next up: Paris!