Where to go, where to go?

One year ago, Joe & I thought we would spend our winter vacation in Australia. Well, as things go, that didn't make any sense considering I would be living in Barcelona. So we instead decided to get ourselves here and then figure out what we would do.  We had no plans whatsoever, but we had a few cities we wanted to visit thanks to my growing interest in European Christmas markets.

The picture above is a sampling of my notes as we started looking at pricing and schedules to and from various cities.  After about three hours of research, we had this much to go on: We would fly via RyanAir to Budapest, and work our way back to Barcelona. Other than booking a few hotels, and referencing an awesome guidebook Kevin lent me about Budapest, we had nothing concrete planned.

Looking back, I wish we had planned just a *bit* more.  It would have been nice to be fully prepared to see a city.... and make sure there were train tickets left to get to the next one... and know what I was ordering in a restaurant....  But then again, that's part of the fun right? Figuring it out as you go? Yes, of course! I should add that without TripAdvisor's awesome downloadable City Guides, we might not have been as successful. I can't recommend them enough.

Okay, enough talk of this. Let's get to the trip!