How a Travel Writer’s Book Turned into My Travel Bible

While I had friends going abroad during the same semester as me, I was the only one going to Scotland. Not only that, but I was also the first in my family to study abroad and I had never been out of the country. I was completely lost, until my grandmother recommended this American travel writer, Rick Steves. I could not have imagined how much this old travel writer’s books could help me as much as they did. 

• First, I thought about where I would want to go. This is most important and should be done on the earlier side. Do not buy flights or tickets days before if you want to avoid paying too much money. I learned that first hand. Rick Steves has books on a lot of places in Europe, so I went to my local library and checked out one book of his on traveling in general and the books that correlated with the places I wanted to go. He had ranked on a scale the major sites worth seeing and times of the year it would be best to go depending on your schedule. This helped me organize where and when I was going to go somewhere. 
•  Since I was the only one of my friends abroad in Scotland, I was usually farther from the destinations we were wanting to go and was always traveling alone to meet up with them. As someone who was not always the planner in my friend group and did not have a lot of people to ask travel advice from, I had a lot to learn on my own to make sure I was going to the right place and safely. Rick Steves helped me figure this out as his books and website have recommendations of easy and cheap train routes from place to place, valid hotel and hostel websites, cheap airlines to take, and more. When traveling to London for a weekend, I did not know a sleeper train could take directly from St. Andrews to right into London at a better rate than flying would have. Not to mention, his recommendations of hostel websites helped me find a really good one that had complementary breakfast and was within walking distance from all the sites I wanted to see. 

I realized that a lot of my friends, who had been abroad or had a general sense of planning travel accommodations, had started to use more of the websites I recommended and a lot of the other tips I had learned from Rick Steves. 

Ultimately, if you find yourself in a similar situation to me, do not be afraid to use travel books or other resources different from those based on social media like TikTok or influencers. Rick Steve’s travel guides helped me get a better idea of how traveling worked, what transportation I would use, how to travel alone as a female college student, and how to do this all coming from Scotland, a place that can sometimes be more challenging and expensive to travel from if you do not know how.