As the year comes to an end, I took a look back through my blog and social media activity to remember all the places I got to see this year. It has really been a crazy year of travel and I got to meet some incredible people, but my passport didn’t get any new stamps, unfortunately. I managed to keep my travels close to home, only in Europe.

I wanted to recap some of my favorite photos from my trips. It is such a blessing to be able to blog and to get to travel the world, with both family and friends and experience places I never thought I would go to! What is really important for me to share, dear reader is that since I live in the Netherlands, I can fly almost everywhere within 2 hours, and likely KLM offers a lot of options for me to choose from. For all millennials like me, it's pretty convenient to have options especially for city breaks with great timelines of flying.

Beginning of the year, I decided to go live with my blog and also to implement the new hashtag #take12tripsin1year to see how this will work for me and obviously to motivate and inspire others to travel the world more than I do.

Blogging didn’t really take me to new places that I hadn’t been before, that’s something I did on my own, but blogging did take me back to Paris while having my first fully sponsored trip by Thalys.

I started with a surprise trip to Madrid continued with my usual winter getaway, for my birthday I went to Austria for snowboarding with a small detour to Prague for 2 days. 

Shortly after, I spend a full weekend in Amsterdam, which doesn’t really count as travel since I live in the Netherlands so I actually go quite often there, but then again it was a full weekend with accommodation in a hotel! I went to Paris one more time, and the beginning of summer found me strolling Gamla Stan in Stockholm. From there, the rest of my year kind of blended together with a short trip to Antwerp and Brugges, Belgium in July and a long city break in Berlin in August.

This Berlin trip was one of the most awaited trips of all, and I have to admit I was really impressed with the sadness surrounding the city from all the wounds of the war.

September found me back to Bucharest and October took me to discover beautiful Portugal. I visited Lisbon, which was another city on my bucket list, but also, I went to the southern part of the country to the magnified beaches surrounding the Benagil Cave, in Lagos.

November was actually the month I planned not to travel and wanted just to recover from all the inspiring trips I had taken during the year, but like I said, Paris called me, and I had my first fully sponsored trip by Thalys.

From all these sensational places, I went to meet my long-time friends from Paris, Marguerite, and Soumit and we spent an amazing wild weekend in Brussels. This was only the beginning of December, as I went to Bucharest again, this time to celebrate my grandma’s 80est party and from there I flew to London for a Christmas treat.

Between all the international travel, I had a few small trips to Leiden, Delft, Amsterdam, Giethoorn, and Utrecht in The Netherlands, where I live.
Whew! (I also took some time to prepare for fun trips with friends in 2018 and also with my family). But about this, you will find out soon!

As the year ends, I wanted to say how thankful I am for all the opportunities I got to travel in Europe this year. I am so grateful to experience new places as it is always like a dream come true for me but re-visiting cities I previously lived in, definitely makes me nostalgic, but in a happy way. I can’t wait to see where 2018 takes me (hopefully somewhere I didn’t go yet) but my passport is ready!

As a conclusion, I traveled 15 times this year so #take12tripsin1year overperformed. I went to 5 places which I visited before and I discovered 7 new amazing locations.

Definitely, you get to see more of these amazing pictures, if you check my Instagram or Facebook, or watch my videos on YouTube.

Also, if you missed any of my travel stories, take a look through the list on my website for this year’s travel diaries.

Where did you go this year?