Our own travel philosophy even kept us away from Budapest because we prefer to travel to a few places in a new country for a chance to experience many parts of its culture. Budapest alone doesn’t represent the Hungarian people, culture, or energy. However, the closer we got to eastern Europe the more we heard how much fun Budapest was from other travelers. Our own friends that had visited even started asking if we were traveling to Budapest. Finally, in neighboring Austria, we decided that we couldn’t pass it up!

The idea of travel to Prague only excited us even more the closer we got! Friends back home who had visited Prague on past trips only had stellar reviews of the city. They all said prices were cheap, food is good, and the architecture is beautiful. Nobody had anything bad to say. Our friends living in Vienna agreed that we’d have a great time visiting. We got on that FlixBus from Vienna to Prague excited to visit, and our experiences only got better the longer we stayed in Prague!

Croatia was supposed to be our next stop from Venice. Then thunderstorms became forecast for the entire length of what would have been our visit. Most of our Croatian plans were only possible in good weather so a new plan was needed fast. Read as, in a day we had no idea where we were going in Europe! All of Europe was going to be soaked by rain that week so we chose to visit somewhere that knows how to have fun in the rain – London.

We were still debating how much we’d enjoy Venice as we arrived at the Venetian train station. Venice definitely came with a reputation. Tiny crowded streets, tourist traps, and scams are so common that we warned about them multiple times. A dominant seafood scene meant fewer restaurants for our resident vegetarian to enjoy. Rain was forecast on half our days in Venice. However, we were both happily blown away by how much we enjoyed traveling to Venice!

The Dolomites were actually the hardest area to plan for our European travels being so enormous and dispersed. Do we need a rental car? Why does everything have two names? Wait, can we even physically hike up that thing without gear?! We knew nothing before arriving other than a bus system existed so we opted out of a rental car to save money. It became one of the most beautiful weeks we spent in Europe.

Salzburg was probably the city I was most excited to photograph in Europe. I loved what I seen and read before traveling. And no, the Sound of Music being filmed in town did not pull us in despite that being a huge claim to its fame! What I expected was to share fantastic city views with nice people in between meals of great schnitzel. That’s almost exactly what we got!

Munich had two big draws: beers at Oktoberfest, and visiting my old roommate, Feng! I had lots of excitement for beer, friend time, schnitzel, and sausage. While Chandni was also excited for friend time, a city of beer and meat doesn’t appeal much to a vegetarian that hates beer. Our Munich visit went about as she expected outside friend time at home

Zermatt is one of the most famous small towns in Europe thanks to the Matterhorn. There was no way we could miss such a perfect trail loving town! Yours truly had thankfully recovered from a fever in Bern before departing to Zermatt. This was one train ride I didn’t fall asleep on!

This is a weird post to write because I was plain old sick for most of our travels in Bern. Thankfully it didn’t start out that way or I would have missed capturing the banner image featured on this post! Sometime during our first night in Bern I started running a fever. Around lunch time the next day I reluctantly got up, and to be honest, I was more excited for grocery store food than for exploring Bern.

Montreux was our first choice to visit after Chamonix because that’s where the Golden Pass Railway begins. Our Swiss GA Pass even guaranteed free travel on the train! Traveling Switzerland by train had been extremely scenic on every route so we were pumped for this train experience. Then our poor Chamonix luck came back full force…