Europe, Solo, 17 Days
17 days, 5 countries, almost entirely unplanned. What I found was not what I expected.
Europe, Solo, 17 Days
I don't plan trips so much as fall into them. Flights get booked. Everything else figures itself out.
This one started with a booth at Web Summit in Lisbon. I was representing MediaMen at the conference - four days of conversations, meetings, and the organized chaos that comes with 70,000 people in one building talking about technology. After that, I had time. So I used it.
Seventeen days. Five countries. Almost entirely unplanned.
Lisbon
Lisbon hit differently than I expected. Portugal in November has a quality of light that is hard to describe - softer, lower in the sky, making everything look slightly golden even when it is overcast. The city moves at a pace that feels genuinely unhurried rather than just slow. People there seem to have figured out something about the balance between work and everything else that the rest of us are still arguing about.
I walked a lot. The hills in Lisbon are not optional - the city is built on them and they take you through neighborhoods that feel separate from each other despite being minutes apart. I found a coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon that was full of people doing nothing in particular, and I sat there for two hours, and nobody thought anything of it.
Web Summit was the official reason for the trip. But Lisbon was the thing I actually remember.
Spain
Spain I need to go back to. I left feeling like I had only scratched the surface and it deserved more time. The energy is different from Portugal - louder, faster, more chaotic in the good way. The food is immediate in a way that feels almost aggressive - you want to eat everything on the table as soon as it arrives. Madrid specifically has a rhythm to it that I could not quite find in the few days I had.
It is on the list. Proper, slower, more time.
Paris
I walked streets in Paris at 2AM feeling completely fine. That is the city's particular gift - it is alive at 2AM in a way that is not threatening or frantic, just normal, people out, lights on, the sense that the day is not over yet even though it technically is.
The Eiffel Tower at night from the Trocadero is one of those things that is almost too famous to take seriously. And then you are actually standing there, and it is extraordinary, and you feel slightly embarrassed about how much it moves you. I stood there for a long time.
Some things take longer than they should. Then they happen all at once, and you are standing in front of the Eiffel Tower at night wondering how you got here.
Belgium
I did not plan to love Belgium and then did. There is a warmth to the cities there - Bruges specifically - that I was not expecting. The food is better than it has any right to be given that nobody puts Belgium on their list of great food destinations. The chocolate is not a cliche, it is genuinely excellent. The beer situation requires more time than I had.
What I remember most is a canal at dusk, the cold coming in, and the sense that this was a place that had been doing things quietly well for a very long time.
Netherlands
The Netherlands felt precise in a way that was almost calming. Trains on time, streets designed like someone had actually thought through how people move, and cities that manage to feel busy without feeling chaotic. Amsterdam gets overexposed in travel conversations, but what stayed with me was the sense of infrastructure working quietly in the background.
I spent most of that time walking canals, watching bikes move with a kind of order that would look impossible in most cities I know, and thinking about how much of quality of life is really just good systems design wearing a different costume.
What Travel Does
I do not travel to check places off a list. I travel because being somewhere unfamiliar rearranges something. You notice things you would not notice at home because you do not have the shortcuts - you cannot autopilot through a city you have never been in. That attention is exhausting and valuable at the same time.
The unplanned nature of this trip was part of what made it work. When you do not have a strict itinerary, you end up in places that you would not have put on a schedule. The best hours of the trip were the ones where I had nothing specific to do and nowhere specific to be.
That is the part I am trying to protect.