Europe Part II- Packing

How do you possibly pack for a 10 day long vacation in three foreign countries in the spring?? Much like you would pack for a Texas vacation haha. We were very careful packing as we didn’t want our suitcases to weigh a ton because we would be moving so much and we also definitely wanted room for tons of souvenirs.

Clothing:

Layers, layers, layers! We also didn’t want to look too much like dumb American tourists so we were pretty careful to leave the vibrant colors and prints at home. Lenton packed lots of t-shirts and sweaters/pullovers, long sleeve button down shirts and jeans, we also bought him a pair of sketchers shoes that really resembled Sperry’s but had the memory foam insert (like these, though I’m not sure this is the exact pair) and he wore them every single day and never complained about his feet hurting. That’s saying a lot too, because I pretty much walked him to death, like he said he was never going on vacation with me again lol. We also packed him a leather jacket, a thiner rain jacket and also a kind of medium weight in between jacket, this was probably overkill he did wear all three.

Lenton’s Packing List:

2-3 short sleeve tshirts (he also wore these as undershirts)
2-3 long sleeve tshirts
2-3 button downs
3 sweaters
jackets
5 pairs of jeans
2 pairs of comfortable walking shoes (but we didn’t take tennis shoes because I read europeans don’t wear them, and we tried to fit in as much as possible)
Suit jacket (this was mainly for our photo shoot, but we also thought maybe if we went to a nice dinner, but if we went again and weren’t taking pics we wouldn’t take it)
Sweats, hoodie for the plane
Backpack for taking with us while we went walking
Sunglasses
Now for me, that was a little harder lol. I again, packed lots of layers, several long sleeve shirts that I could wear under other shirts in case it got really cold, and a couple sweaters that I could wear over things. I packed a basic black maxi dress which was way comfy and it looked good when I threw on a sweater over it. I also packed a leather jacket (which I probably shouldn’t have, I only wore it a couple times to dinners at night), a black peacoat (which I don’t think I wore once, so that was definitely not needed) and a rain jacket which I took the majority of the time because it was a good weight if it was just a little cold and it was a trench so it covered my cross body which I liked. Speaking of cross bodies, I wanted one that was big enough to hold my camera gear and whatever else I needed. I found the most perfect one at Target, it was on clearance so I’m sure they don’t have it anymore, but it was great. Big enough for my camera body and two lenses, as well as an umbrella, wallet, sunglasses/case, maps, etc.

Shay’s Packing List

2 long sleeve tshirts
maxi dress
1 tank top that could be worn under cardigans or on it’s own
white skinny jeans
3 pairs of jeans
A flannel long sleeve button down
2 sweater/cardigans
sunglasses
jackets
leggings and baggy shirt for the plane/travel days
Fedora – I packed a couple of rolled up shirts in it to keep it from getting squished
Denim Shirtdress
Dress and heels for our photos
Shoes- I packed brown Sperries, black Toms, gold sandals and I wore my pink converse on the plane.
Jewelry that matched everything or at least a lot of my outfits.
Hairspray, brush, shampoo etc.
Padlock to put on the lock bridge in Paris

Now we also had to plan a few other little things since we would be in a different country. We bought this plug adapter from amazon for Paris and Amsterdam (this is basically supposed to be good to use all over Europe, except for the UK), and then I bought this one for London. I liked these because they had two plugs, so we could both have our phones plugged in at the same time. We also bought some amazing neck pillows for the plane, they were memory foam and came with their own bag, these were really nice on those long plane rides. We also bought Lenton a money belt but he never used it, some people swear by them though. He felt comfortable with just a money clip kept in his front pocket. We also got a Selfie Stick, which sounds dumb but it was a great tool for when you’re going on a trip by yourself. We weren’t having to ask random people and hand over our phones or cameras and running the risk of them taking off with them, it was just really nice to have it and we got some great pictures with it!

With our phones, we checked with ATT, and a data plan was just insane, it was super expensive and came with very little data. I didn’t really care to talk or text, but it would have been very helpful to be able to look stuff up or pull up our navigation. So we put our phones on airplane mode and connected to the Wifi at the hotels. Thankfully in Europe a lot of the restaurants have wifi, and since I have an iPhone I could check messages, fb etc. Lenton has a droid so he wasn’t able to but at least one of us could be gotten a hold of if need be, as long as we were at the hotel.

As far as my carry-on, I packed a couple of magazines, my iPad, Kindle, neck pillow, phone charger, passport, my Expedia confirmations, headphones, a few snacks (I’m a very picky eater so I was kinda worried that whatever they served on the plane I wouldn’t eat, thankfully everything was very good), gum. I used a medium size tote bag (you can see it in the first photo) to carry everything in and this worked pretty good, the only thing that took up quite a bit of space was my pillow, but I wasn’t leaving that baby! On my Kindle I downloaded several of the Lonely Planet Pocket Guides, they are all free if you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, and they were very helpful. Not too much info that you were overwhelmed I kind of just scanned them on the plane and trains before we got to each city.

I also pre-booked our Stonehenge tour through Premium Tours, we booked this tour which went to Windsor Castle, Bath and Stonehenge.  This was one of my favorite things that we did, I’ll get into more detail later.

That’s all for now, I hope you found it helpful!