The plan started way back in September-ish, when Josh found a hot deal on flights to Geneva. We booked those and decided to fill in the trip casually over the next few months. Fast-forward to March and we really hadn't done anything beyond buying and doing some light reading on Lonely Planet and Rick Steves.

We did a day-long brainstorm of places we were really interested in seeing, then formulated a general idea of a loop that would start and end in Geneva. I created a map that would give us an idea of how things landed geographically, and this served as an anchor for the entire planning process.

I very much wanted to have the trip planned out before departure. Sometimes looking for hotels and trains can be an adventure, but I preferred to reduce the stress level and didn't want to spend, say, half of Tuesday looking for a hotel for Tuesday night. So we gradually worked out car and train schedules, knowing that we could then come back and figure out accommodations, restaurants, and sightseeing.


I had decent cell service the entire trip, but it made sense to download offline maps prior to departure.


We downloaded Google translate and the offline language packs. It had the usual type/speak translation functionality, but Jes and I were most impressed by the photo translation feature.



We brought 2k in euro and 1k in Swiss francs and returned with 800 euro. Cash was especially helpful for avoiding out-of-country card charges.