12 COUNTRIES IN 12 WEEKS

Our European Vacation

You know how you always talk about places you want to see “one day”? Well, we started to realise that one day has a funny habit of sneaking up on you. So we decided to do something a little ambitious a trip through twelve countries in twelve weeks. We figured we would be able to see all those things that we really want to see.

Now if you know us, you know we’ve never been big on organised tours. We like doing things ourselves — planning the routes, booking the accommodation, and having the freedom to change plans if something better comes along.

But this time we tried something different when we started planning, we used AI. Instead of starting from scratch, we asked ChatGPT to give us a rough itinerary. Something like: “Create a 7-day self-drive photography tour of Scotland starting and finishing in Glasgow.”

And just like that it produced a plan, now it wasn’t perfect — not even close — but it gave us a starting point. From there we pulled it apart, moved things around, added locations we wanted to photograph and removed anything that didn’t suit our style.

For example, one of the suggestions it gave us was a first day driving from Glasgow up to Glencoe, stopping along the way at Loch Lomond and Rannoch Moor, with photography spots at Buachaille Etive Mòr and the Glencoe Valley.

Even if you’ve never been there, those names alone make you want to go. So the AI gave us the bones of the trip, and we built the rest around it. Of course, planning a big trip like this isn’t just about deciding where to go. Flights, luggage limits, accommodation and transport all became part of the puzzle.

And as we discovered pretty quickly… things don’t always go exactly to plan.

The Great Points Plan

For years we’d been quietly collecting frequent flyer points.

The dream was to eventually use them for one of those round-the-world tickets through the airline alliances. It’s a great system if you can make it work — you basically hop across the globe using partner airlines.

The trick is getting something called Classic Reward seats. That’s where the points are really valuable. Unfortunately, because of a few family things that came up, we missed the perfect booking window. By the time we sat down to lock in flights, most of those reward seats had disappeared. The only option left was something called Classic Plus. Let’s just say… the points cost was eye-watering.

We also discovered another interesting rule. If even one flight leg is booked in First Class, the whole trip gets priced at the First Class rate, that escalates things very quickly.

So we changed tactics.

Instead of chasing Business Class seats, we booked Premium Economy and then requested a Business Class upgrades for the flights. Sometimes you get lucky with upgrades, sometimes you don’t, but the good thing was we had the overall trip locked in.

Then we discovered the next problem, our luggage.

The Luggage Shuffle

You’d think airlines would all have similar baggage rules, they don’t, not even close. One airline allows 23 kg checked luggage and 7 kg carry-on, another allows 20 kg checked and 10 kg carry-on, and the flights we were taking to Iceland allowed 15 kg checked and 15 kg carry-on.

So before we even left home we were already doing what we call the luggage shuffle, moving things between bags to make sure we didn’t get stung with overweight luggage, and because we’re travelling with camera gear, that makes it even trickier. Cameras and lenses always travel in carry-on — no way they’re going in the hold — but they weigh a lot more than people realise, so packing became a bit like playing Tetris with suitcases. Eventually we got it sorted, at least for the first flight.

Why We Chose Hire Cars

When we started planning the trip we looked at all sorts of travel options trains, camper vans, even a few organised tours. But in the end we came back to the same thing we always prefer, hire cars and small motels. The reason is simple photography, if you’re driving through somewhere beautiful and suddenly the light breaks through the clouds, you want to be able to pull over right there and take photos. A train won’t stop and a tour bus definitely won’t so the hire car gives us freedom.

Most of our accommodation is booked through Booking.com because a lot of places offer free cancellation, that means if we arrive somewhere and think, “This place is fantastic — let’s stay another night,” we can actually do it, flexibility is everything when you travel this way.

Travel in the Age of Apps

One thing that’s very different about travelling these days is how much technology helps along the way. This trip is basically powered by apps, one of the best ones we found is called LocationScout. You open the app, put in your location, and it shows you photography spots nearby with pictures from other photographers. If you pay for the premium version you also get GPS coordinates and directions. It’s brilliant when you arrive somewhere new and want to know where the good photo spots are.

But that’s just one app, we also have apps for:

Aurora alerts, Parking locations, Public toilets, Toll roads, Weather forecasts and Google translate just to name a few.

There’s pretty much an app for everything now, of course, even with all that technology, the trip still started with a few surprises.

The Journey Begins

Like we always say, travel is about taking the good with the bad. The first little disappointment came pretty quickly, the Qantas Club in Tamworth was being refurbished, which meant no sneaking a few Tim Tams into my handbag before the flight.

And unfortunately we also missed out on our Business Class upgrades, but Premium Economy turned out to be really comfortable, and when they offer you a glass of champagne as soon as you sit down, it’s hard to complain.

The first flight was eight hours to Singapore, which went pretty smoothly, we had a two-hour stopover there, so we headed straight to the lounge for a shower before boarding the 14-hour flight to Heathrow.

The plan was to get some sleep so the 12-hour time difference wouldn’t hit us too hard, that plan lasted about ten minutes we barely slept at all. So when we landed in London at 6 in the morning, we knew we had a long day ahead before we could check in to our accommodation.

Luton and the Midnight Wake-Up

Instead of staying in central London we took the National Express bus to Luton Airport, it’s about an hour’s drive and cost £21 each. Our hotel was the Holiday Inn Express, only about 500 metres from the airport, which made things easy.

We tried very hard to stay awake until evening so we could reset our body clocks, but by 3 pm we gave up and went to bed. Big mistake, we woke up again at midnight, wide awake which seemed like a good time to start writing about the trip. The next morning we had a surprisingly good hot breakfast at the hotel before heading back to the airport.

First Country: Iceland.