Three countries in ten days is not a trip. It is a commute.
Sue plans slow, multi-country European itineraries. Fewer stops, longer stays, and enough unscheduled afternoons that the good parts have somewhere to happen.
Call Sue at 573-355-2438 or email sue@adventuresbymj.travel.
Who this is for
You have two or three weeks and you would rather know one region properly than photograph five of them badly. You want the pasta-making afternoon with somebody’s grandmother, not a coach with a numbered lanyard. You have forty browser tabs open and you are further from a decision than when you started.
If what you actually want is the most countries stamped per dollar spent, a guided group tour will do that better than Sue will, and she will tell you so rather than sell you something else.
How Sue builds these
Fewer destinations. This is the whole game. Almost every first draft of a Europe trip has one or two stops too many, and the cost is not money. It is the afternoons you spend in transit instead of in a town. The long version of this argument is here.
Longer stays in fewer places. Pick a base, unpack, and take day trips from it. You see more this way, not less, and you stop losing a morning to every move.
The right months. May, June, September and early October are the working window for Italy, France and Spain. Comfortable weather, manageable crowds, and prices that have not been set by school holidays. More on timing by country.
Trains where trains make sense, a car where they do not. European rail is having a genuine moment, with faster networks and new sleeper routes. It is not the right answer everywhere. Rural Puglia is a car. Rome to Florence is a train, and anyone who tells you to drive that has not tried to park in Florence. Train versus river cruise versus guided tour, compared.
Where Sue knows best
Italy first, and by a distance. Tuscany, Puglia, the Amalfi Coast, and the southern regions most itineraries skip. Then France, Spain, and unhurried weeks on the Greek islands. If your trip falls outside that, she will say so and refer you out rather than learn on your vacation.
The shoulder-season argument
Puglia in October quietly delivers most of what people chase in June Tuscany, for roughly half the cost, after the crowds have gone home. Olive harvest, whitewashed hill towns, orecchiette in a trattoria where nobody is filming it. This is the single best piece of advice Sue gives about Italy, and almost nobody takes it the first time. Here is the case.
What Sue does that a booking site does not
- Cuts the itinerary before building it. The first conversation usually ends with fewer places than you arrived with.
- Books the hotel in the part of town you actually want to walk out of at nine at night.
- Sorts the ZTL problem before you rent a car in Italy, rather than after the tickets arrive in the post six months later.
- Builds in the empty afternoons on purpose. A trip with no gaps in it has no room for the parts you end up telling people about.
- Says when a river cruise or a guided tour would serve you better than a custom itinerary. Sometimes it would.
When to start
Six to twelve months out is comfortable for a custom Europe trip. Shoulder season in Italy books earlier than people expect, and the small properties worth staying in have eight rooms, not eighty.
Start here
Send Sue the two or three weeks you can travel and the one place you already know you want to see. She will come back with a shape for the trip before anyone talks about deposits.
Call 573-355-2438, email sue@adventuresbymj.travel, or use the contact form.