88 Days Across Europe: A Solo Backpacking Reckoning

The Eurail pass in my pocket, a 40-liter backpack, and €2,000 for three months. Europe taught me to travel light in every sense.

The Opening Move: Portugal to Greece

I entered Europe through Lisbon on purpose — it's the gentlest entry point, the most affordable, and the least likely to overwhelm a solo traveler setting their sea legs.

The first week in Portugal was adjustment: learning to slow down to Portuguese time, to accept that the 10am start time for most things means 11:30am in practice, to eat dinner at 9pm instead of 6. Pastéis de nata from the original Pastéis de Belém bakery, standing at the counter, dusted with cinnamon. This, I thought, is what travel tastes like.

Italy: Where Everything Slows Down

Rome stopped me for three weeks. I arrived for four days and renegotiated my entire itinerary.

The scale of Roman history is vertigo-inducing in a different way from Patagonia — not the scale of space but the scale of time. The Forum was functioning government 2,500 years ago. The Pantheon has had an unbroken roof for 1,900 years. These aren't ruins; they're survivors.

In Florence, I understood what it meant to be visually overwhelmed by accumulated art. After the first three rooms of the Uffizi, my brain stopped processing properly. I sat on a bench and looked at nothing for 20 minutes. This is apparently normal. Gallery staff call it "museum fatigue."

France: Paris and Beyond

Paris everyone knows. What they know is mostly wrong.

The real Paris requires French, patience, and a willingness to look stupid. My French is catastrophic. I mispronounced "merci" for the first week. By the end, I was getting through entire meals in French, which the waitstaff found charming in the way adults find children's art charming.

Beyond Paris: the Loire Valley by bicycle is the best day trip in France. Châteaux every 30km, vineyards between them, Loire wine at the source.

The Balkan Detour

The Balkans are the best-value, least-touristed part of the continent. Kotor, Montenegro: a walled medieval city on a bay that looks like a fjord, largely undiscovered by mass tourism. Plovdiv, Bulgaria: European Capital of Culture 2019, with an old town of painted 19th-century mansions and a Roman amphitheater in the city center.

What Europe Is For

Europe is not an adventure destination in the way South America is. It's a cultural density that rewards slow travel. Spend a week in one city and you begin to understand its character. Spend a month and you begin to have opinions about its neighborhoods.

88 days was not enough. I have a list of return trips that will take another decade to complete.