Welcome to the website entirely devoted to documenting Tim and Benton Wilson’s 55-day tour of Europe in the summer of 2022. This website exists entirely because we wanted to keep a record of what we did for our own future reference. You’re welcome to poke around, but know that it’s a site primarily built by and for the two of us. For the most part, it was built during the trip, and it’s somewhat unique in that it’s pulling information from a variety of sources and then assembling it here (that picture up above, for instance, will change randomly if you refresh this page).
The driver behind the trip was that Benton was finishing up his Master’s degree and had the summer off before starting work at Meta in September 2022. Tim had been at the same company for over four years and had enough sway (and zero F’s to give) to request a 2-month leave, so the trip was on!
There were a few key principles that we were easily aligned on:
Avoid, to the extent possible, major tourist destinations: Paris, Rome, London, etc.
Don’t try to “see everything”—it’s not possible, anyway, and would introduce anxiety
Avoid asking any Americans who had traveled to Europe for input (knowing they would provide it, anyway)—their perspective would be inherently limited, and would inevitably be, “You should go see the things we saw.”
Don’t overplan the trip—leave flexibility both stay longer in any particular spot that grabbed us
With those in mind, we booked our flights over and the first couple of weeks of lodging, and that was it. We also:
Did some research on good travel backpacks and bought Salkan packs (main pack and daypack)
Tim waffled as to whether or not to bring his good camera and, ultimately, while waiting for Alana to arise one morning in a hotel room in Morgantown, West Virginia, semi-impulsively decided to bring the camera and pulled the trigger on a new lens
Bought various clothes/shoes in the interest of flexibility and light travel
Thanked fate that Tim had decided to get his hippy mop lopped off at the end of 2021
The trip started on Saturday, 25-Jun-2022:
Benton had flown to Atlanta a week earlier to spend the week with Lucy in Augusta and wrap up the writing of his thesis
Tim had a conference in Las Vegas the previous Monday-Wednesday, had red-eyed back from that on Wednesday night, and then worked on Thursday and Friday
The plan (which we executed successfully) was to meet up in Newark (Tim from Columbus; Benton from Atlanta) and then fly together to Shannon, County Clare, Ireland.
Tim had various alarms over the course of the week leading up to our departure: two people he spent a lot of time with in Vegas contracted COVID while they were there. Tim… did not (max vaxxed, had gotten COVID at the end of January already, was one of the most-masked attendees at the conference). And, Tim’s original flight to Newark was canceled, but he was able to get on an earlier flight after some confusing interactions with United Airlines (which led him to privately commit to doing what he could to return to the U.S. via Delta and their partners if possible).
But, ultimately the departure from the U.S. went off as planned, and this site is a log of that trip. Or, as Tim thinks of it, it’s the consolidation of a variety of data sets that captured the details of the trip from many different angles: in words, in pictures, in steps and sleep and distance covered, in places visited, and more. That’s not all here just yet…but the core audience for this site is two people: Benton and Tim—a project was conceived and, in many ways, executed during the down time in the heat of the day in various AirBnBs across multiple countries.
Various curated sets of pictures from the trip (these have some overlap):
All of the pics (including a number that didn’t make it into any of the above)