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Well, actually, I don’t remember the particular day when we had this idea. It seems to me that it came gradually.

We were living in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, and let’s face it, we got tired of it. Tired of the cold and terribly long winters, of the lack of animation in the city and especially of social life. In short, we were fed up, and needed some change.

The original idea

The initial idea was to move to the Netherlands. Who hasn’t dreamt of Amsterdam? Neither my boyfriend nor I had ever set foot there, so we needed at least a trial period.

The first issue was the prices. Rental prices in Amsterdam are painful to say the least. On top of that, there is no direct flight between Tallinn and Amsterdam, so we had to take the bus to Riga, to be able to take the plane (at least, that was the cheapest). So we started to look around and tried to plan a first scouting trip. But very quickly doubts set in, and the idea finally came to us to visit several countries in order to decide where to settle. If we were going to spend money, we might as well see different places. 

The birth of the project and the questions

At this point, it was just an idea that needed to be made concrete. Nothing is more concrete than a list, or rather lists. Lists of questions, lists of things to check; should we take a special insurance out? How long should we travel? How do we choose the destinations? Which things to take and which to sell?

Once all the paperwork was taken care of, we could move on to planning the trip itself. We thought that we would stay 1 month in each country, as one month seemed to be the perfect length of time to enjoy each place.

At the beginning, we chose not to choose a destination, we took the cheapest flights for October 2022, and it fell on Budapest in Hungary. 

From Budapest, this method would take us in November to Catania, Sicily, then to Krakow, Poland in December.

Our summer was already mapped out, and the trip was about to start in October 2022.