What a Trip.

We have now finished 10 days on the road.

What. A. Trip.

This started as a work trip.

A slightly unhinged plan to drive across Europe, visit as many hotels as possible, collect ideas, ask questions, take hundreds of notes, and somehow turn it all into something useful.

And somehow...

We actually did it.

But somewhere between the hotel visits, 50+ hours in the car, sleeping at gas stations, getting threatened with the police, questionable parking decisions, and complete exhaustion, it became something much bigger than just a research project.

It became one of those experiences that I genuinely think we'll still be laughing about decades from now.

It has been 10 days of:

🚐 Driving far more hours than any sane person probably should.

🏨 Walking confidently into hotels we had absolutely no business walking into.

📝 Filling notebooks faster than we thought possible.

⛽ Sleeping at gas stations across Europe.

🥐 Surviving on what can only be described as a nutritionally questionable road-trip diet.

📍 Waking up and needing a few seconds to remember which country we were in.

🤝 Meeting some of the kindest, most interesting people.

😴 Discovering entirely new levels of exhaustion.

😂 Laughing so much that half the trip already feels like one long inside joke.

Some moments that definitely deserve their own posts...

The hotel where nothing worked

I won't name names.

But imagine checking into a hotel where every single interaction somehow created an entirely new problem. Every time we thought we'd reached peak dysfunction, something else happened.

At some point it stopped being frustrating and became genuinely impressive.

Denting the car

Naturally, this happened early in the trip.

Nothing builds team spirit quite like standing next to a freshly dented car in a foreign country and collectively deciding that panicking isn't actually going to improve the situation.

Becoming friends with the truckers

Apparently, if you spend enough nights sleeping at European gas stations, you slowly become part of a completely different community.

By the end of the trip, I genuinely think we were only a few nights away from being accepted into the European trucking industry.

The Hells Angels

A sentence I never expected to write in a post about hotel research.

And yet...

Bar night in Paris

Because after spending an entire day running between hotels, interviewing staff and taking notes, the obvious decision was apparently to go out.

I have absolutely no defence for this one.

The Airbnb in Milan

Some places give you somewhere to sleep.

Some places give you a story.

This one gave us several.

And probably a few trust issues.

There are so many more moments I could add.

The wrong turns.

The conversations with complete strangers.

The hotels that completely surprised us.

The people who opened doors for us when they had absolutely no reason to.

The moments where we were so tired that absolutely everything became funny.

The moments where the entire plan fell apart... and somehow ended up even better because it did.

This trip was chaotic.

It was exhausting.

It was slightly ridiculous.

At times, it was genuinely stressful.

But it was also one of the best things I've ever done.

We set out to study hotels.

And we did.

A lot of them.

But I honestly don't think the hotel notes are what I'll remember most.

I'll remember the car.

The gas stations.

The truckers.

The dent.

The random people we met along the way.

The terrible decisions that somehow became great stories.

The very questionable sleeping arrangements.

And laughing so hard somewhere on a motorway in the middle of Europe that we could barely breathe.

Ten days.

Seven countries.

More hotels than I can count.

Far too little sleep.

A ridiculous number of kilometres.

And enough stories to last a lifetime.

What a trip. ❤️