The Great Sabbatical of 2025

My sabbatical has come to an end, and that means it’s time for a retrospective.

I plan to publish some fun¹ opinion pieces later, but here I’m just going to cover how I spent my trip (and my money).

Itinerary

My trip was 46 nights total. I started in Lisbon, worked my way east through Spain and south through Italy, then looped back through my favorite parts of Spain and finished in Lisbon again.

1. Lisbon, Portugal (4 nights)
2. Seville, Spain (2 nights)
3. Granada, Spain (1 night)
4. Madrid, Spain (6 nights)
5. Barcelona, Spain (3 nights)
6. Mallorca, Spain (5 nights)
7. Bergamo, Italy (2 nights)
8. Milan, Italy (1 night)
9. Florence, Italy (3 nights)
10. Rome, Italy (3 nights)
11. Naples, Italy (3 nights)
12. Bergamo, Italy (2 nights)
13. Madrid, Spain (1 night)
14. Seville, Spain (8 nights)
15. Lisbon, Portugal (2 nights)

Visually, it looks like this:

And here I’ve sorted the cities by where I spent the most total time:

26 nights in Spain, 14 in Italy, and 6 in Portugal.

I was able to consistently make the most of my days until my second Seville visit, at which point I got pretty sick. Up until then, almost every day involved close to 20k steps (some days 35k), and I was always seeing a lot of new things. The only exception was my time in Mallorca, where the remote location of my hotel limited what I could do with my time.

But on my return to Seville I finally paid the piper for five weeks of unhealthy eating and short sleep. For three days I was just glued to my Airbnb’s couch, and the only culture I absorbed was Duolingo lessons. From that point forward, I accepted my fatigue and took a much more chill approach – which was actually fine, since I’d already seen Seville and Lisbon once before.

Workouts

Despite dreaming of using the warm weather of Southern Europe to run every morning, I didn’t work out very much. I’d expected it to be easy to find running routes but hard to find weightlifting gyms. In reality, only some cities offered a convenient running trail², but there were more decent gyms with day passes than I’d expected.

In the end, I ran 10 times and lifted 11.

Expenses

Thanks to YNAB, it was really easy for me to track and categorize my spending in Europe.

This works out to about $235/day, a number I was happy with. I did a very good job on accommodation ($78/night without staying anywhere terrible) but overspent on food and drinks ($74/day). Traveling between cities was more expensive than I’d expected, partly because I had to fly several times and checking a bag on those flights was costly.

The unlabeled segments of the chart above include things like international cellular data, gym fees, buying items I’d forgotten to bring with me or had lost on the trip, and entry for tourist activities.