I can’t stand the wait until our trip!!! Ideas to kill the time please.

I sympathize. I have spent decades not mentioning my trips to friends and relatives unless someone specifically asked, and even then I noticed that their eyes glazed over after a one-sentence response. Thus my post count on this forum.

There is help right here. Click on "Explore Europe" on the left side of this screen. Select one of the countries you'll be seeing on the tour. Scroll down and Click on "Plan" then on "...recommended books and movies". Now visit your local library.

Are you anywhere near a travel group meeting ? That's a place where EVERYBODY understands why travel is fun and worth doing.

I don't know if you live in an area that has a community college or some kind of foreign language and culture school, but I would take a class or two based on where you are going to learn some of the language and culture. Take for example a class beginner French 101 with other people. Think of it as gaining skill and insight; moreover you will get better regard when you know words in a foreign language. And from my experience you meet like minds in those classes that will tell you about their travel plans.
Where I live a lot of adult foreign language classes are like after 5 pm or on weekends and when you take one it is mostly adults like you.

LeeAnn, a good way to kill the time would be to take some French or Italian classes, read some novels and watch some movies based on the places you'll visit. Language classes will multiply the fun of your trip immeasurably.

You're among friends here. Been there, done that. The anticipation can be excruciating. I second the suggestion about books and movies. Learn about the history of some of the places you'll be. Learn some of the language Duolingo and Memrise are my go-to language learning apps. Both free.

Have fun!

Perhaps this post will help. I have read through all of it twice and it makes me laugh.
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/general-europe/you-know-you-have-a-travel-addiction-when

At least you will know you are not alone. :)

I second the idea of finding a travel group. It's a "safe space" where you can talk all you want about trips, past, future, and hypothetical. I love our Tulsa Area Travel Group. Nobody's eyes glaze over when you talk about travel. You'll make new friends, (we did!), pick up lots of tips, and maybe even find travel partners (again, we did!)

Check out the travel group section on this forum. Better yet, start your own post there, and ask if there are any groups in your area.

If you're anywhere near Northeast Oklahoma, we'd love to have you join us the third Saturday of each month.

Here's a link to the proper place on the Forum: https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/travel-meetings

Yes, we understand. I’m currently reading Paris by the Book by Liam Callanan—it should be available from your public library. We stream lots of international movies and shows on MHz, a channel we get through Amazon Prime, and there are tons of hours to keep you occupied as long as you don’t mind reading English subtitles. You can watch French shows as well as shows from nearly every European country.

You've come to the right place! Under the Watch/Read/Listen section of this site, click on "Travel Talks" to see taped classes that Rick has given on various countries. Also, I love grabbing a glass of wine and hunkering down with the scrapbooks that various tour members have created here. Under the Our Tours section, click on the "Scrapbook Contest" picture on the right hand side. Enjoy!

When my husband and I were planning our first trip to Europe many years ago when we were in graduate school we took an Italian art history class. Actually, we did not take the class but brought our lunch and crashed a large lecture class where our presence was not noticed. It was great because when we visited Rome, Florence, and Siena we actually knew what we were looking at.

Perhaps you could find something on history or art to amuse yourself and make your trip more meaningful.

These are all great ideas! Thank you all so much! My daughter and I had talked about learning key phrases for at least Germany, Italy and France so that will be a fun project to start working on as well as books, movies etc. I live in a fairly rural area so not sure what our community college might have to offer but I’m going to look.

It’s so nice to find you all here. Travel groups would be a blast!

LeeAnn there is a travel group that meets in Tualatin every month. Are you close enough to make it there?

Or if you are in NE OR come on up to Moscow ID on the 3rd Saturday! October ‘s meetup will be a different day as that is UIdaho Homecoming and it’s just too difficult to get to our meeting location but we post a thread on here.

I’ve got a different suggestion. Start reading www.theviviennefiles.com so you can start to obsess over capsule wardrobes, lol!! Then you can start recreational packing, haha! You’ve got plenty of time to run some trials on how much shampoo etc you will need for your travel time. This will require some record keeping.

The 21 day trip is wonderful! You all will have a great time. Start your walking now. We went at least 10-12 miles in Amsterdam and Rome. The better your fitness level the more fun you will have.

We are all excited for you.

I agree with Pam. It's less than a year until your trip. You should start packing now and you can spend a lot of time reading ideas for packing light-Travel Girl, Adventures with Sarah are a couple of really good ones-and of course the Packing forum here. Read books-Ross King's book about the dome in Florence so you can really be amazed at what an accomplishment that was. You Tube videos-you are traveling to a number of countries, so you need to start now, learning about them and the sights you're going to see . Your guides will tell you these things, but if you learn them in advance, you'll be able to better remember what the guides tell you.

LeeAnn, welcome to the club! After I retired from work, we turned our den into a relaxing room with a couple of recliners, a tiny tv, etc. I have a photo canvas wall-hanging over the tv from my Italy trip. If I seem to be glancing at the tv, I’m really thinking about that trip and planning another!

Regardless of where you live, some on-line free language options I like to use are Duolingo and YouTube language videos.

If you haven’t read through the RS guidebooks in detail, yet, that would be very valuable. There’s a lot of good advice for what to do and what not to do, along with the city walks, top sites to see, etc.

The packing light topic (lots of info here on the forum) is very helpful - less is certainly more!

I enjoy taking a cooking class during my trips and making them at home afterwards. You could research some on-line country-specific authentic recipes and try making them. The rest of your family might get enthused about this idea!

Enjoy your trip!

I am 71 years old and realized many years ago that I never wanted to kill time. Time is valuable, Be glad that you have all this time. Yes, anticipation on a trip can be high. Do your research and know what you are going to see. Read books about where you are going. Study the history of the countries were you are going.

For example, if going to Paris, read a Victor Hugo book. He was a marvelous writer. Also, there are some great books on the French Revolution.

I am going to be in the minority here to discourage focusing too much on this trip. If you research it 'to death' and spend all your time watching it on DVD or YouTube, you leave no sense of the unexpected to be awed and delighted....which is most likely what the anticipation is for. Sure, practice some languages, maybe even lurk on travel forums....but please, put this into perspective and set limits. It is only 4 weeks of your life.
I had a period in my life where I was traveling, volunteering, planning....and it took up a lot of my spare time...to the detriment of time spent with my social circles. I am not an extrovert with a large group of close friends so these social circles are important. But I was distracted enough that they moved on with their lives without me. Don't let this become so all consuming that you don't pay attention to the relationships around you now...as they are going to be the ones that are still around when you get back.

I remember asking a somewhat similar question when I signed up for my RS Greece tour in 2017. I never have my plan set 9 months ahead of time, but with this trip, due to why I was taking a tour in that year, I had the huge lead time. It was hard. Fortunately, the holidays will distract to some degree. However, the guide books I read were the most read guide books of any trip! LOL. I also think that's when I truly became a packing addict as I concentrated on packing through the long winter months. In fact, I went over board and am now a recovering packing addict. Try to enjoy the anticipation with looking at other aspects of the trip.

Yes,there is something to be said for awe. I was just in Paris for a work related event. I had been in Paris but 30 years before. I have a colleague who has lived in Paris for 3 years now who played tour guide. It was great fun for him to show me around every corner especially when there were surprises I had never seen.

I think this is where limiting the u-tube can be helpful. I know many years ago I went to the Grand Canyon and felt like I was not appropriately awed because it looked like all the pictures I had seen all my life. On the other hand, I was totally awed by Zion National Park because I had not seen many pictures.

Oh TravelMom, that travel addiction thread has me crying with laughter..... from my hotel room in Dresden 🤣🤣

LeeAnn, I understand your concern! Do go read that thread!

Perhaps there should be a Skype based travel group for those who live in rural areas 😉

Just re-read Zoe’s travel addiction thread that TravelMom linked to and laughed all over again!!

Oh Lord.
We are twins.
I'm the same.
You are not alone.
Before a trip, it is all I can think about; and when I get home, I start bookmarking apartments to rent for the next trip over a year away.
Help is here.

:)

Thank you Travelmom... that post is absolutely hilarious. And so me lately!!! Love the one about hanging out in the travel section of libraries and bookstores so you can talk about travel. Too funny. I really enjoy planning & organizing the trips and that usually is sufficient to ease the torturous wait but I think this one is different as we have been planning it for 10 years. Lol.

While I fully agree with BethFL and MariaF that I want to be surprised and not too informed about everything we're going to see and do, (My daughter doesn't want to talk about the trip much for that very reason and she wants to be completely surprised) I also don't want to miss seeing something amazing because I didn't get tickets ahead or plan for it etc. I avoid looking at too many pictures and reading too many individual responses and reviews because I want to be surprised as well. I honestly don't want to learn too much about the various cultures in advance either as I'm really looking forward to watching and learning about that as we go. I really don't want to learn too much about the food in advance either, as I want to try new things without always knowing what it is (or I might not try it!).

I think the perfect solution is to get studying on the language and continue with packing/preparation. I really need advice on what clothes to bring! I am NOT gifted at picking out my day to day clothes anyways so this is causing me some anxiety. Believe it or not, I am actually laid back and very go-with-the-flow on vacations. I just love traveling so much that I enjoy all of the planning.

And I tried the focusing on Christmas thing but found myself thinking of all the Europe related gifts to get my daughter for our trip!!!! HAHAHA I'm hopeless....

LeeAnn, did you not say this is a tour? Ah, I see, with days added either end. Well, for those dates, if you give us a clue where they are (we do not all take RS tours), then sure, we travel peeps can help you....but things can change, as it seemed happened in Florence and Rome for some of the key city cards, or tourist sites.....so being too early means you may make mistakes with assumptions of how to go about things, too.

In terms of waiting for the day of the trip, I don't kill time but rather put it to use...read more history or spend the time enhancing the foreign language skills, ie more vocab, specially verbs, more grammar.

One cannot over learn in adding more to the foreign language knowledge.

MariaF, we will be starting in Haarlem, Netherlands and ending in Paris.

I think Christmas and travel are a great combination. Two years ago we took our young adult children to Greece. Christmas was a lot of presents related to travel, guide books, a dvd, charger, pillow for the plane, water shoes, hats, AND a packing list that I developed. I honestly am not sure that any of them read the books (depended on me instead) but the rest was well used. And the next year when our youngest who had never been abroad before Greece returned to Europe visiting Portugal this time, he wanted me to send him that packing list again!

So I think Christmas is a great time to give some travel related gifts to your daughter. And doing so may save some scrambling before you leave.

I plan short getaways throughout the year which helps me just get through retired life at times.
I have a few days over Christmas planned up the coast in CA. I have been doing a week in Mexico every February for years, and we have a National Park trip penciled in for next June.

We leave for Portugal and Barcelona and Madrid RS tours next 8/28. Rooms are booked along with air travel to Europe. Return flights are not available yet to be able to us FF miles.

I’d suggest YouTube. There are endless travel vlogs on there. And, once you reach that saturation level, you can watch travel vlogs of places you’d never go, but it’s fascinating to see. I remember seeing one on North Korea.

LeeAnn, if you have some time, here's the tour report I did of the 21 Day Best of Europe. We did this tour in 2018. We had done it some years before, but we were celebrating a milestone anniversary in 2018, and revisiting this tour was my husband's choice to celebrate.

Be warned: the report is long!

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/april-15-2018-21-day-best-of-europe#top

Do take a language class...especially at an adult ed school you will probably meet like-minded people and maybe pick up some travel tips. And if you aren’t already in good physical shape, start walking or going to the gym. Polish your photography skills. If you don’t journal, get in the habit. It will make it easier to keep a travel journal if you already write on a regular basis!

I did find one cure for this trip anticipation obsession...wait until the very last moment to plan a two month trip to Morocco and Europe. Although I bought our airline tickets three months ago and reserved the Morroco tour in August, I just booked our Paris apartment yesterday and our train trip from Nuremberg to Berlin today. And we leave in less than three weeks! So, now my anticipation is squeezed into a short time period and I think it is manageable!

Jane, thanks for the link to your post about the trip. Very interesting! What did you mean when you said that a couple of shoppers got through? Did they spend a lot of time shopping and hold everyone up?

And thanks everyone for the suggestions to be physically ready. I knew this tour had a “strenuous” rating but wasn’t entirely sure how that would look and I think someone said 10-12 miles in Amsterdam and Rome. That shouldn’t be any problem for us. The heat on the other hand!!! I hear it gets pretty warm in Italy! We are NOT used to hot summers where we live so that will be a bit of a challenge. Again, I find that being physically fit helps to cope with that too.

What do the the people do that can’t handle all the walking? Do they just skip certain things and stay at the hotel or do whatever?

“What do the the people do that can’t handle all the walking? Do they just skip certain things and stay at the hotel or do whatever?”

Everyone hung in there on my tour. There were some mutterings and the guide said I can help you get a taxi any time. They also start with a transportation lesson so if you decide to do something else you can get around on your own.

No one stayed at the hotel on tour days.

On my first RS tour my SIL was sick to begin with (I think she picked up norovirus on the plane). The guide got her settled at a sidewalk cafe while we did a walking tour and she joined the group later.

You are free to leave the group and do things on your own, you just need to let your guide know and also your “buddy”. RS tours have a buddy system. You pick a buddy (someone you are not traveling with) and when the group gathers to leave somewhere the guide calls “buddy check”, you make eye contact with yours and off you go. Quick and easy. So...your buddy needs to know if you are not going to join the group.

Add stairs to your fitness routine! Rome is hilly!

LeeAnn, that was meant as a joke. Many tours, but not Rick's, make a point of having plenty of shopping opportunities, in some cases because the tour leaders get kickbacks from the vendors. Rick's tours absolutely do not do this. In fact, one of the items sold on this website is what's called the "Don't Tell Rick" bag, a fold up bag that can be unfolded to hold your purchases. And on one tour we took, our guide, very fashion-foward, repeatedly pointed out her favorite shopping places, always saying something like "Don't tell Rick I'm telling you this, but..."

We did have some dedicated shoppers on our BOE tours, but no, they never held up the group. They did their shopping on their own time. We did, however, have some shoppers hold up the group for well over an hour on another tour once. They wandered off to shop instead of joining the group (which is always allowed,) but lost track of the time, and then got lost and couldn't find their way back to the meeting place. Our guide gave their spouses instructions on how to take the train to our next destination, and the rest of us, belatedly, got on the bus to continue our tour.

Spend time planning experiences on your added days at the beginning and end of your trip and free time during the tour. Later make reservations necessary. The tour will fly by so just enjoy that time. With so many stops it will be hard to fully research them all. The tour guide will give lots of ideas for using free time. Take time to plan your travel light clothes and “stuff”. Less is truly more. My last 3.5week Europe travel was packed in a RS small day pack. Amazingly it worked. I will admit it was extreme.

Don’t forget to have times you just relax and observe wherever you are. I’ve learned that some of my best experiences are those that weren’t expected.
(I really like the suggestion for reading novels/books set where you’re going. When we were in Moscow, we made sure to go to Patriots Park mentioned in Nabokov’s novel The Master and Margarita. We found some wonderful sites and cafes on our quest. The Dan Brown Italy books make seeing many sites in Rome, Florence and Venice more exciting.)

Pinterest in your friend. Start your board on Packing, start researching how to pack in a carry on only (you tube), what to pack, your 3-1-1 bag, good walking shoes, your day bag, your flight bag (how to pack that). Do a board for each town you are visiting and start pinning ideas, food that is not to be missed, rooftop bars, romantic places, jazz bars whatever you are into. In Paris the Pharmacy is a must for me, i have a whole board on JUST pharmacy beauty products. Make sure your Passport is up to date. Make a list of things you will need to buy then start purchasing (adapters, sunscreen, travel size detergent, electronic cords holder,etc), makes the cost less of an impact and clear our some space for all your "travel stuff". Your trip will be here before you know it!

I believe the more you learn about a place, the more you enjoy it when you get there. There is still room for surprises.

For language study, I suggest the French in Action series, which you can get for free on a laptop or iPad.

https://www.learner.org/resources/series83.html

Watch it together with your daughter, one episode at a time. The focus is on French family life, with a young woman just about your daughter's age as the central figure.

For books and movies, I will suggest one of each: the book "Is Paris Burning" which is a gripping account of Paris during WW2, and the movie Midnight in Paris which is pure fun. I am sure others can add to the list!

Now, for the next two months, try to forget about the trip and focus on the upcoming holidays. Then start your "program" in January.

this is going to be a weird suggestion, but you could explore the cities you are planning to visit using Google street view. Literally walk the path from the Train station to the hotels you are thinking of booking, get familiar with landmarks and restaurants, ect. It's a great way to build excitement and feel more comfortable with your trip at the same time

Thanks Pam & Jane for the advice. Having never been on a group type tour, or really any other travel tour, I didn't really know what to expect.

Many people use the 21 day BOE tour as a sampler, with the idea that they will be going back to explore in more depth. You might find it helpful to think about this trip as an introduction to Europe, instead of just a once-in-a-lifetime experience,

Good point, Bob. In fact, we chose the Best of Paris tour the year after our BOE because we loved those last few days in Paris so much.

My daughter doesn't want to talk about the trip much for that very reason and she wants to be completely surprised

Well, It’s her senior year, after all. For most teenagers, the best year. If she’s into extracurricular life, possibly planning for college, not to mention keeping up her grades, she may want to live in the present for now.

I’m glad you found this Forum, lots of understanding, we share your enthusiasm. Do start reading the new posts and join in! The information you have learned in your own trip planning is a valuable resource to share with people who come to this Forum for advice. And your excitement is contagious!

Yes, Bob. That is a good idea and that’s part of why we chose this tour. We’re thinking that if for whatever reason we don’t make it back, we’ll have seen a lot of amazing places! We’ve been saving for ten years for this trip if that gives you any idea how long it might be before we’d get to go back, lol.

And Barbara, she is for sure busy with all the senior stuff as well as a social life and college search etc. I am SO glad I found you all! I also realized I need to be enjoying her senior year more too myself. It will be over before I know it and she’ll be off.

LeeAnn, please make a trip report when you return from the trip. It will be interesting to hear your impressions, since its all new to you.

I agree, go to a travel club, RS or a meet up group. Google street maps and “walk” around the areas you will be visiting, use TripAdvisor or yelp to find restaurants, then get on their websites to see what you might order, start a blog and be familiar with how to post things so you can keep a diary of your trip, make lists for packing, keep reading the forum, examine maps to see what’s around future trips, study the places you will be seeing and learn about the sites. Lots to do!!! That should keep you busy until June :-)

These are all really helpful ideas. My father in law passed away unexpectedly a week ago and as I’m sure you all can imagine, it is a very sad and busy time. Any active trip planning is on hold for a while. I am so glad to have the happy times and trip ahead to look forward to and so glad to have found this forum.