Over 9 years together, Elizabeth and I have seen a lot of the United States. The Rocky Mountains, the Coastal Ranges, the Appalachians. Lake Michigan, Lake Ponchartrain, Great Salt Lake. Fairview, Oklahoma, and Fairbanks, Alaska. We’ve driven, flown, boated, and taken trains all over the landscape.
But our international experiences have remained notably sparse. There was that Caribbean cruise years ago, and our honeymoon in Iceland, and our 2024 trip to Cabo. But other than that, the rest of the world has remained a closed book to us. So when Elizabeth’s cousin Alex got engaged to his girlfriend Kate and they let slip that they were planning an Italian wedding, an opportunity awaited. An opportunity that in time grew, fleshed out, and became our great 2025 European adventure: certainly the most audacious, and some would say the most memorable vacation we’ve ever been on.
The wedding was on October 10, 2025 near the town of Lucca in Tuscany, Italy. That formed the nucleus of our travel plan. Elizabeth wanted to travel with her immediate family since Pam had never gotten to take her children to Europe; the three of us plus Winston ended up traveling together on this odyssey. The plan grew and branched out as we – mostly Elizabeth and Pam and Pam’s travel planner Vanessa, though I contributed to more of the planning than some people might tell you – schemed. Eventually a two-week trip came together featuring multiple flights, a couple of train tickets, two rental cars, and an offline-available app named Axus. A brief breakdown:
October 5-7: The town of Sorrento on the Campanian coast of Italy
October 7-9: Rome, Italy
October 9-12: Lucca, Italy + the wedding
October 12-15: Lech, a small ski village in far western Austria
October 15-18: Interlaken, Switzerland
As that itinerary implies, it was travel by constant motion. The logistics were made even more fun by the fact that a black-tie wedding meant we had to bring multiple suits/dresses/dress shoes/whatever else. All four of us had to check a suitcase in addition to one or multiple carry-ons. Jamming all of the bags into a rental car or barging onto a train with them sounds like a nightmare, but it really wasn’t that bad. I didn’t love having to pack my bags back up every couple of days, but it kept me from letting a hotel room somewhere become a mess.
Speaking of hotel rooms… Pam and Vanessa handled that part. I’m not afraid to admit that our accommodations in Europe were far nicer than anything I’ll ever be able to afford on my own. Hell, even flying business class is a luxury that Elizabeth and I will probably uselessly aspire to for the rest of our life, but on this trip we enjoyed every second of it. The same goes for dining opportunities; if it had been just Elizabeth and myself, we would have gotten a tour of the pubs of Europe. It would have been delicious and relatively cost-effective. Instead, we visited restaurants that had Michelin stars, or were only accessible by small boat on the Amalfi coast, or had a villa chef teach us a cooking class. And THEN we hit the pubs of central Europe. It was truly an exquisite couple of weeks.
There’s so much to be said and written from this trip. Each of the individual stops could (will) easily be a blog series lasting several months to process. If I wanted to, I could easily write 50, 60, or 70 posts about this trip. If there’s anything I’ve learned from multiple insanely long blog series over the years, it’s that I don’t want this writing project to linger into 2028. So I have made a rough roadmap of 30 or so posts to cover the entirety of the fun. For each location, I’ll have a post outlining the geography of the place, where we stayed, and roughly what we were excited to do. Then there will be feature posts that highlight some of the more memorable things we did. Then I’ll write a post about the food of the location, and a closing post highlighting something random from the location and our final impressions. Between that and a weeklong trip to Glacier back in September, I’m sure there’s plenty to keep me busy through 2026. But that’s the way I like it!
At the bottom of this post, I’ll start attaching links to the other posts as they accumulate. I’m excited to share the adventure with you!
