With a passion for fashion, traveling with just a backpack never appealed to me before 2022. There were always too many things I wanted to pack.
But since I began traveling more as a travel reporter for Business Insider three years ago, I've realized I needed to lighten my load to make it easier to hit the road for longer periods of time.
I made the minimalist travel style a priority in August 2022, when I spent a week backpacking for the first time through Eastern Canada. It turned out to be a lot easier — and more efficient — than I'd originally thought.
So when I planned a two-week train trip through four European countries two months later, I decided to push myself to fit everything I needed into my backpack again.
Over the course of two weeks, I backpacked across Germany, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland while exploring the cities of Berlin, Vienna, Venice, Rome, Milan, and Zürich. It was my first time visiting each country and backpacking in Europe.
As part of my travels, I slept in shared train cabins and budget Airbnbs, and initially, I felt like I was living the life of young adults on a gap year, or post-college students on a big adventure.
But I quickly realized it wasn't as glamorous as I expected it to be based on stories I'd heard from other people, or more commonly, pictures I saw on social media.
On Instagram, I've often seen epic photos of an empty nature scene save for the backpackers with a caption about life being an adventure.
But after backpacking Europe myself, I found that the travel style was full of hardships I rarely see posts about.