Planning the trip of a life time: 5 countries in 10 days

Just the title alone sound daunting and everything about this is. Let’s first go through the locations planned.

Amsterdam: We are going to land here with a direct flight from Houston. We are hitting the sights but avoiding the coffee shops as that isn’t my cup of tea.

Brussels: With a love of beer, this had to be a stop on the list. Things are getting crazy there so we will try to be safe.

Prague: How can you possibly go to Europe and not hit Prague. It is supposed to be the coolest on the trip.

Munich: This is the main point. To go to Oktoberfest. One scratched off the bucket list.

Moscow: I know right! Everyone I tell that I am going there asks the same question. “Why?” Well that is simple. No one I know has ever been there. So why not? I would say YOLO but that is so 2015.

Let’s go back to how this trip planning started. Over 2 years ago my Unit in the National Guard was supposed to go to Germany for their Annual Training. Needless to say we were super excited. My brother and I, who were in the same unit, spent months planning to go there and even volunteered to go early to help get everything set up. A week before we were supposed to leave they cancelled the trip due to the government shutdown. Disappointed doesn’t even come close to describing our morale. Shortly afterwards we were complaining about not being able to go and decided we were going to plan our own trip.

We started out just saying “let’s go to Germany.” Well if you are going to Germany, when is the best time to go? Ahhh ha.. Oktoberfest. So we marked the calendar for the Oktoberfest roughly two years later and the planning begun. We found a fantastic tour company that is exclusively for Oktoberfest. They are called Thirsty Swagman.

We looked on a map and knew we wanted to go other places. We decided we might as well fly into Amsterdam to start the journey. We are spending the first 3 days there.

From that point we plan to get a ride to Brussels. There is a lot of bad stuff going on right now in Brussels so we are going to try to stay out of that mess and focus on the outskirts.

Originally we were going to train ride from Brussels to Dusseldorf. They have the largest bar in the world and that would have been a sight to see till we noticed how cheap a flight to Prague would be. We booked it that day.

In Prague we booked an Airbnb so that portion is going to be exciting as we are going to try to hang with locals.

Munich, which is the start of the show, will be 4 full days of fun and excitement.

Moscow is what we are all kind of excited about. We had to jump thorough all kinds of hoops to get a visa added to our passport to enter Russia. One of the questions was about if I had any explosives or firearms training. I sure didn’t want to say extensive so I just put US Military. That seemed to be ok enough for them.

This is going to be the most epic trip we have ever planned and was one of the big sparks for me wanting to do a travel blog. I can’t wait to go there. Take lots of picture. Drink lots of beer and try to write about it to share with everyone.

If you have been to any of these places or have some must things to do, please let me know. Especially if it is what locals do as that is always my focus.