The Five Resources We Found the Most Useful

We have books. But the internet won.

1.  r/travel

I spent countless hours on the travel subreddit.  I posted numerous questions (where to stay in Madrid and the best way to get from Budapest to Ljubljana, etc.) and got loads of feedback.  My pack is 2.5 lbs lighter because of advice people gave me when I posted my packing list.

It's hard to overstate how useful a resource r/travel can be, both for getting advice about specific issues as well as browsing the posts to get inspiration for your next trip.

2.  Google Docs

We have numerous Google Docs shared between the two of us.  You can access them from anywhere, from work or from your phone.  We have a couple packing lists and still-need-to-do lists.  We have one that is just random future travel notes/links.

Here is an example of the way we used them.  This is the main Google Doc we used to compile all the info we found.  It is full of links to blogs and Tripadvisor reviews of hotels and huge paragraphs I have copy and pasted from Reddit as well as lots of advice and notes from various friends and family.

3.  Rick Steves

His website has a lot of good packing advice.  His youtube channel has cool videos about pretty much every destination in Europe.  He also has a radio show on the weekends on NPR, which is the reason that Basque country is on our itinerary.

4.  Rome2rio

Rome2rio is a crazy useful site for planning transportation.  It gives you a list of all the options to get between two places.  If you type in Valencia>Dublin it will give you the cost and time to fly, to drive or take a bus (and ferry).  It will also give you the price to take the train to Madrid and fly out of there.  And if you have multiple destinations it will do this for each leg of your trip.

5.  Hipmunk

My favorite site to search for flights. Apparently run by a cool chipmunk with intimate knowledge of the airline industry.   It lays out all your options on a big, readable timeline/graph.  It has the options to sort results by arrival, departure, duration, price or agony.

Honorable Mention - seat61.com  is a really great resource for info about rail travel in Europe.  As mentioned previously, I've only booked one pair of train tickets so far and this site has already saved us more than $100.