We Leave Tomorrow!

4Packing Recommendations 4

There were a few different blogs that I referenced for really great packing lists, I have attached the hyperlinks here for your convince:

Girls Complete Packing List, What to bring vs. what not to bring, Packing Light!

And then of coarse I modified my list to fit me and the activities I plan on doing while backpacking! 

Luckily my sister isn't bringing much with her, so I was able to put our shared toiletries in her backpack, for example we purchase regular sized conditioner and shampoo because the travel size ones are only good for about 3 washes if you have shoulder length or longer hair. 

This is the backpack I am bringing, as well as a leather messenger bag for daily use when we leave our packs at the hostel. 

   

Everything I have read saids to pack as light as possible, so that is what I have attempted to do, but I still have the burning urge to keep adding things to my pack!

With Love, G

Planning a backpacking trip to Italy and Greece... Where do you start?

Once my sister and I decided we wanted to make this happen, we then realized that we should probably start to put some information together and plan a bit. Since I was living about 600 miles away from her at the time, we weren't able to meet up and put together a game plan, so we opted for the next best thing (and my lifeline all through out college) Google Docs.

In order to keep an excel sheet up to date real time, while we both accumulated information we decided to create a Google Excel Doc where we could both edit it instantaneously. Here is a screen shot of how we organized our budget, our timeline, to do list, places we wanted to see, ect. I highly recommend using this platform to organize yourself a bit :)

Then we started filling it in! I used sites like Nomadic Matt, the savvy backpacker to get averages on how much it would cost for hostels, food, transportation, activities, etc.

And we created a general timeline for ourselves, we don't want to plan everything out to a "T" but we do want to at least have a general idea, and make sure we end up in Athens at the end of the trip to catch our flight!

My sister and I are the adventurous type, so we have been looking for activities like parasailing, scuba diving, and more, in these cool locations, and I have found that Nomadic Matt's travel guides are a really good place to start! I have been looking through the Greek Isles Activities on his site, and then taking it a step further to research the individual companies that we might make a reservation through and also so I can see how much it will cost.

So far this is been the method to our madness I hope it helps you get started in planning your next trip!

With Love, G

Bucket List: Italy & Greece

Me - "Okay so in about three weeks I won't have a job,"
Sister - "AWESOME! Lets go on the backpacking trip to Europe that we have always wanted to go on!"
Me - "(pause, considering rational things like money, and rent, ehh f*%! it)... I'm in!"

And that's how it happened, we bought a plane ticket to Rome and three weeks later a plane ticket back to the US from Athens, other than that we don't know what the heck we are doing... (If you have any insider tips on things most tourists don't see let me know!) 
So needless to say, I have been obsessively looking at photos of the Greek Isles, and other islands in the Mediterranean, and well... there is no shortage of them. When my sister and I were deciding where we wanted to go and Greece came up, the first thing I though of (as any true 20 something girl should) was Sisterhood and the Traveling Pants. I want to find my Kostas Dunas! Oh and you can bet I will be jumping off that same dock that Alexis Bledel, as Lena Kaligaris, jumped off of in Santori, "can you turn my black roses red!"                           
Anyway... so I will be traveling through these two countries with my little sister. We have never backpacked before, and I have only stayed in a hostel once (and right when I walked in the bar tender puked on the ground and the hostel manager dropped a towel over it and went to bed, good first impression). Needless to say, I am a little nervous, our plan is to bring one of those plastic bed sheets parents put on mattresses for their little kids when they wet the bed, and to put it over the mattress in the hostels and then to lay our sleeping bags on top of that, hopefully eliminating the chance of bedbugs or lice or just sleeping on a bed someone just had a "really good time in", yikes!   

If you have any tips please let me know! :) 

With love, G