Traveling with Friends

If you’ve ever traveled with friends, then you know how exciting and exhausting it can be. Despite all of the aesthetic instagram pictures and snapchat stories that are displayed, you never actually see what happens behind the scenes. My two close friends and I decided to plan a three week Europe trip together. We all have known each other since high school and have done small five day trips together in the past, but five days is nothing compared to a three week trek.

Planning was super exhilarating at first with the anticipation of where we would go and what people we would meet, but after a few moths of narrowing our trip down from seven places to five and then five to three, it was time to start the real work. We chose to go to Spain, France, and Italy which are the places most typically chosen, but also necessary to visit. As recent graduates, we were on a budget, so we were planning on roughing it on this trip. We spent lots of time researching the best places to stay in each country, what items we should bring as rookie backpackers, and of course one of the most important things to me, the food. The first thing I learned was that planning a trip is not very fun (which is probably why travel agents exist). After you get past the point of looking at all of the beautiful pictures of the locations you want to visit, you have to go through all of the logistics of planning, like how to get from one place to another or how much money you intend to spend in one country over the course of five days.

The two friends that I travelled with are some of my best friends but we obviously are a little different from each other. What I mean by this is that one of my friends is super laid back and has a very free spirited mentality which meant that whatever we did she was always content with. My other friend who is on the opposite side of the spectrum, knows exactly what she wants to do and loves to plan everything to the T. I, however am a mixture of both. This caused some inevitable tension on our trip, but in the end it was good that we had a plethora of personalities to switch things up, because to be realistic without my Type A friend we wouldn’t have gotten anything done and without my Type B friend we wouldn’t have done half the spontaneous things we tried.

Three, in my experience has always been a hard number. The world is not really made for odd numbers. I mean think about it, you get on a train and there are only two seats next to each other and in life you are always being asked to “get into pairs” or to “grab a partner.” I always knew this about groups of three but somehow thought this trip would be different. The issue is that three weeks leaves a lot of wiggle room for tensions to rise. There were points during the trip that all three of us felt excluded or if we didn’t in the moment, we had to be conscientious of each other feeling that way. At times, this was overbearing to think about but by the third week of the trip I had to put those feelings aside because I couldn’t fully enjoy myself otherwise. Most people need a little bit of alone time within the course of three weeks, but we were constantly together. We even stayed in hostels, so we were put in rooms with five other people which actually was helpful as it added some other personalities in to the mix. At times, all three of us would get sick of each other and would snap, but by the end of the day we would always talk about our favorite parts of the trip and would laugh over how often we would get on each others nerves.

Over the course of my college career and this trip, I have realized that relationships, whether they be romantic or platonic, are hard. As people, we are constantly changing and relationships either foster that change or stray away from it. Even though, my friends and I had our differences, we always talked out how we were feeling. Those hard conversations only took up about 10% of our trip but the other 90% we were pretty much always laughing and having fun discussions. So I guess the takeaway is that sometimes it takes a three week vacation to test your relationships or maybe next time I’ll make it a four person trip instead.