How to Travel in France and Germany for Cheap: Budget Travel in Europe

Recently, I returned from a 4 month trip to France and Germany, with my girlfriend Raegan. While there, we worked at farms in exchange for room (place to sleep) and board (food) and couchsurfed. Doing this allowed us to travel for about a euro ($1.50) a day or even less. To get from place to place, we hitchhiked, took trains, and took buses.

Before leaving, we scheduled our trip using these websites. You’ll save hundreds and thousands of dollars in traveling costs if you travel like we did. Here they are:

Kris jumping. Stomping tarps in Loqueffret, France.

WWOOF
http://www.wwoof.org
WWOOF stands for Willing Workers On Organic Farms. Essentially, it’s a website where you agree to work 4-6 hours a day, 5-6 days a week, in exchange for room and board. At this site, you’ll see links to the WWOOF sites in European countries, like France (http://www.wwoof.fr) and Germany (http://www.wwoof.de). For a nominal fee of about $25 euros a year, we joined the France and Germany site. By doing this, we saved hundreds of dollars in hotel and hostel fees.

Couchsurfing
http://www.couchsurfing.org
Couchsurfing is a site wherein people with couches, futons, beds and spare rooms make them available for you to stay. Why? They like company and they like showing people around their town. In exchange for you being friendly, a good listener, and nice, you get a place to stay. Usually, it is for 2 days. It can be longer, though.

Ludmilla

On our trip, we couchsurfed in Brest, France for 5 days, and when taking a train to Berlin, were invited to couchsurf at a punkhouse (bunch of punk kids living in an apartment) for as long as we wanted. We accepted, and stayed in a high ceiling room of one of the kid’s who was out of town.

Google Maps
http://www.maps.google.com
Use Google maps to plan your route of travel. This comes in handy for hitchhiking, too. Print the maps before you leave.

Travel in France Cheap
This, my friend, is how you travel in France for cheap. Using these websites, you can enjoy budget travel in France or Germany or any other European country. A bonus of traveling this way is that WWOOFing (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) gives you an inside look of what it’s like to live with and live working alongside a local farmer.

Berlin punk friends

Why You Should Travel to France
Our experience traveling was amazing. The joy of traveling to a place like Europe is that you learn to accumulate experiences and adventures more than things.

Things rust. Things require maintenance. Things require the inevitable upgrade. Things require warranty. Things require repair.

Experiences and Adventures that Come With Traveling
Experiences and adventures, however, stay with you. Participating in an adventure allows you to grow as a person, enabling you to have more confidence. There’s even a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex that thrives on novelty (new experiences). Thus, the new experience of traveling, especially to a place you have never been before, will help develop your mental capacities to reason, to learn, to understand, and to grow as a person.

An Insider’s Guide to Budget Travel in Europe
If you’re interested to know more details of how to travel in France and Germany, I’m putting together an e-book that will explain how to travel in Europe for about one euro ($1.50) a day. In it, you’ll learn …

1. What you need to do before you leave
2. What you need to bring
3. How to travel around Europe for months
4. How to earn money online while traveling

and more.

Send any questions you have about traveling in France and Germany, so I can address these in the e-book. Also, let me know what you think a fair price would be–what would you be willing to pay–for this e-book. E-mail me at: bicycledays@yahoo.com with “travel ebook” in the subject line. Thank you.

Riding horses in Sternhagen, Germany