Europe 2013: “Imagination Sets Sail”

I’ve always loved the great outdoors. Rain, hail, or shine, I always wanted to stay away from the house for as long as I possibly could. Now that I’ve been increasingly independent, away from my parents, I thought, “Why not fly to Europe?”.

The idea of flying overseas was on my mind ever since I flew to the United States with the family back in 2009. The only other international flight since then was to Vietnam with the family (again), in 2010. I guess I could argue that I’m clearly overdue for another international trip. Something in me is just telling me that I need time away from everything in life. I’m sure most, if not, all of you out there are feeling the same way.

Anyway, Europe came across my mind mainly because, well, I’ve never been to Europe and I’d be more than happy to experience it in the flesh, and not through videos on YouTube. Also, because I wanted to go to ID&T’s Tomorrowland Music Festival in late-July, which I heard was the best Electronic/Dance music festival in the world.

Planning started quite early. In early-October to be exact. The plan back then was to fly from Melbourne to Germany for the German F1 Grand Prix, then to Italy to visit friends, then to Belgium to experience the much hyped Tomorrowland Music Festival, then fly across to South-East Asia to experience both Thailand and Vietnam (again). Three months later, plenty of ideas have come and gone, but I decided to cut South-East Asia off the itinerary. The reason being because I was told to, “not experience the whole world at once”, and that “I’ve got a whole lifetime to experience the world”. I was pretty much convinced from that.

I’m still in the planning stages of the trip and working my ass off at work, so nothing is set in stone just yet, but the current plan is to fly to the UK for the Great Britain F1 Grand Prix, then Germany for the German F1 Grand Prix, then Italy to visit friends, then Belgium for the Tomorrowland Music Festival. So basically, the plan is to stay in Europe for just a little over a month - which is plenty. And it’s probably clear to you all that the F1’s are clearly something that I love.

The only reason why “nothing is set in stone yet” is because of the music festival in Belgium. Tickets for the festival last year (which amounted to 180,000) disappeared in a matter of 45 minutes, and over 2,000,000 people tried to buy tickets at the same time, so basically you’d have to be extremely lucky to score tickets. This is the heart of the Europe trip, so if the worst case scenario happens (fail to score tickets), this whole trip will blow out of my hands.

I’m both confident and excited for this Europe trip to go ahead. This will be the first time that I’ll be going without the parents watching my every move, so it’s both frightening and relieving at the same time I guess. I’ll keep you all updated with the plans (and more) for the trip in the next 6 months, but expect the next blog post to come in about two weeks.