Travel

19 Countries in 10 Weeks: Europe Backpacking Itinerary

Surprise, I did in fact survive my 10 weeks of backpacking in Europe. It’s been almost two years since I dropped off the face of the blogging Earth, but I’m back, and I’m ready to tell my tales. I got back from Europe in the knick of time to attend my graduation ceremony in Seattle (well, 1 out of 2 anyway), celebrated my 22nd birthday, and started working full-time the very next day. Since then, I’ve been fully immersed in the world of consulting with weekly travel to the Bay Area. That’s right folks— every Monday I’d fly down to SFO or SJC, and every Thursday back to SEA (or wherever I chose to spend the weekend). But that’s a story for another time. 

Today I’m back to share with you my EuroTrip itinerary, because I worked too damn hard on it to not shout it from the rooftops. I hope with a mighty passion that there’s someone else out there who is looking for a way to explore 15+ European countries in 10 weeks, and they stumble upon this blog for ideas.

Before we jump into the itinerary itself, I want to give you an idea of the time of year and goal I had in planning this trip. I graduated in mid-March, and started work in mid-June. So I had just under 4 months to fit everything in that I could possibly do, for the first time with (almost) zero work/school responsibilities. The trip I planned was from March 25th – June 6th, so it was primarily a Spring backpacking adventure. Pros: things weren’t nearly as busy as a EuroTrip planned in the Summer. Cons: Iceland and London were quite cold, and the temperature varied quite a bit between these two in March/April and Greece in May — this made it a lot harder to pack in a backpack… Lucky for you, I blogged about everything I packed too.

10 Week Europe (+ Morocco) Itinerary

✈️ Iceland

Days 1-9: Road trip around the island (separate blog post coming soon) 🚗

✈️ UK

Day 10: Bath 🚗

Day 11: Salisbury / Stonehenge 🚗

Day 12-15: London

✈️ Spain

Days 16-18: Barcelona

✈️ Morocco 

Days 19-20: Marrakech 🚗

Days 21-22: Sahara Desert

Days 23: Fes, Morocco 🚌

Days 24-25: Chefchaouen, Morocco 🚗

Day 26: Fly out of Tangier, Morocco

✈️ Portugal

Days 27-28: Porto 🚆

Days 29-31: Lisbon

✈️ Spain (again)

Days 32-34: Madrid 🚆

Days 35-37: Seville

✈️ Germany

Days 38-40: Berlin

🚆Czech Republic

Days 41: Prague

🚆Austria

Days 42-43: Vienna

🚆Hungary

Days 44-45: Budapest

✈️ Switzerland

Days 46-47: Zurich

✈️ Croatia

Days 48 – 49: Dubrovnik

✈️ Greece

Days 50-51: Athens ✈️

Days 52-54: Santorini

✈️Switzerland

Days 55-56: Interlaken

🚆 Italy

Days 57-59: Milan 🚆

Days 60-62: Florence 🚆

Day 63: La Spezia 🚆

Day 64: Genoa 

🚆 France

Day 65: Nice 🚆

Days 66-68: Paris 

🚆 The Netherlands

Days 69-72: Amsterdam

✈️Denmark

Days 73-75: Copenhagen

✈️Norway

Days 76-78: Bergen

Disclaimer: this itinerary was customized to me, my friends, and family. It’s not the most efficient route, but it was how I could best organize it to fit my friends and family’s schedules for when and where they wanted to visit me on my travels. You could even flip this itinerary backwards, to optimize on better weather in the colder locations (other than Norway). Take it as a light suggestion, but I was very happy with the amount of time I had in each city/country, so I wanted to share a rough outline of what we did in Europe!

So there you have it– 19 countries in 78 days. Best. Trip. Ever. This trip took me almost a year to plan– in terms of figuring out dates, optimizing on flight prices and hostels, and organizing with everyone I met up with along the way. For details on how I planned the trip, read my blog post here on the best planning tools for backpacking. Let me know in the comments which of the sections you want a more detailed itinerary on!

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