Every year, thousands of recent college graduates, or similar free-wheeling idealists, descend on Europe to roam from city to city with a Eurail pass and an overstuffed backpack. The paths they trace are well worn, and often overly touristed. Thankfully, the World Party Guide provides a perfect plan for a re-mix of this trip.

There are scores of summer festivals scattered throughout Europe, and it would be impossible to hit them all. I’ll just run down a brief time line here for a trip that would take you to some of the biggest and best parties, and still leave you time to nurse your hang over and visit some of the more traditional stops along the way.

June:

1: Krakow Poland for the Lajkonik Festival. Is a fun way to start things off, reliving a bit of history – celebrating the defeat of the Mongols – then drinking delicious Polish beer. Then you have a chance to explore some of Central Europe, cruising down through Slovakia to Budapest, then back up to Vienna, and finally Prague before catching a cheap flight to Stockholm.

19-21: Stockholm for the midsummer celebrations. The longest days of the year all blend together at the top of the world, and I hear that the party lasts longer than the sunlight. You have a couple of days to recover before hoping on a plane to London and heading out to the biggest music festival in Europe.

24 – 28: Glastonbury for…Glastonbury. It means skipping over to the UK, but this wouldn’t be a summer party tour if you missed the biggest one. You rock for a couple of days and get covered in mud in the process

July:

You’ve got the last couple of days to enjoy England, and then skip on over to Spain.

6 – 11: Encierro Pamplona. The running of the bulls is more than the 4 run. There are massive festivities to be had for a solid week. Though you won’t be able to stay until the end as you’ll have to head west to Nava.

11 – 12: Nava Cider Festival. You’ll arrive on the second day of the cider festival. And yes, this really is a giant party to celebrate alcohol. You’ll have to dash off before the end again, however, as you’ll need the 13 July to travel to Paris for…

14: Bastille Day in Paris. Hopefully you actually arrive on the evening of the 13 for the party the night before. Then on the day itself, you can catch the parade, fireworks, and keep on partying. You’ve got the rest of the week to cut through France and Belgium to get to Essen.

18 – 19: Love Parade in Bochum, just outside of Essen. This massive electronica dance party has gotten to big for one city, so now it moves around Germany. Expect well over a million people to be there dancing non-stop the whole time. Things start to slow down a bit at this point, and you have a week to wind your way through Germany to Kulmbach.

25 – 26: Kulmbach Bierfest. Name says it all: beer festival, and in one of the best places for god beer to boot. The festival is actually 9 days, but I reckon that a couple of days should do the trick.

August:

You then cruise south to Salzburg for the Salzburg Festival, which runs the length of the month. You have a bit of time to cut South through the Alps all the way to Sienna.

16: Il Palio horse race in Sienna. As seen in the Quantum of Solace, this is high stakes horse race in downtown Sienna. Of course there is plenty of partying, booze, and delicious food to be had after the race. You’ve then got a week and a bit to use as you see fit to make it to Buñol, Spain.

27: La Tomatina, the world’s biggest food fight in Buñol. It’ll be nuts. You throw tomatoes at people for an hour, and in the process, get repeatedly pelted yourself. It sounds perfectly fantastic if you ask me.

29 – 30: Notting Hill Carnival is your last party as you prepare to head home. The streets of this otherwise prim and proper neighborhood are packed for the weekend with non-stop dancing, deafening music, delicious Caribbean food, and if you’re luck, you might just see the actual carnival too.

After that, summer’s over and it’s time to return to real life. Note, that it is possible to pack more parties in if you are willing to catch a few more flights and sacrifice downtime/recovery time. For example, in that break between Glastonbury and Pamplona, you could go to the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. This is also likely to be a bit of a pricier trip than your average summer backpacking Europe, but it certainly will be a significantly more adventuresome one. Have fun detoxing and catching up on sleep in September.

I felt a little guilty that I ended my short look on volunteering holidays advising against them. I feel a bit more validated in this ad on Facebook. Is that seriously the picture they meant to have with that ad? That’s not volunteering, that’s dancing in a club. Obviously I love meeting new folks and going nuts in a cheap club. But call the trip what it is. if you’re there to party, then don’t call it a volunteer trip.

The Idea that kicked off this blog was an epic road trip from London to Melbourne, and from time to time after a few drinks, I get to talking about the idea again. Last night my buddies and I started dreaming a little larger for our vehicle, specifically a double-decker bus.

This certainly meets my requirement of being a perfectly ridiculous vehicle to drive across the world. Also, it turns out that you can pick them up used fairly cheaply, with very little looking I found one on Ebay for under 3,000 pounds. It also has the added bonus of providing a fair amount of livable space. The drawback of course is the size, it sucks gas, and if you have to take it on a ferry then you might pay an arm and a leg.

Still, it’s and idea I’m going to explore further.

This is obviously not a time to be in Mumbai. But the Contemporary Nomads, Tony and Thomas, are there. Their blog is generally very good, but right now it’s a must read. From their latest post:

Two men wearing backpacks and armed with machine guns were firing bullets in all direction blasting holes in a car’s windows below me. The men were literally just meters below, I clumsily threw myself back into the hotel room, yelling to Thomas to hit the deck between the bed and the solid cement wall next to it. The entire time machine gun fire was continuing outside. Terrified that the men might enter our hotel, I crawled back to the door and locked it. I jumped up and quickly found the panel of switches next to the door and switched off our room lights and the TV as well as our air-conditioning system, so that it would appear that our room was locked and empty.

I wish the best of luck to Tony and Thomas, and hope that they can find somewhere good and restful after the adventure they are stuck in right now.

Woo hoo! My first month of National Geographic Adventure arrived. The subscription was a present that I am most grateful for. Hopefully it will fuel some more trip ideas and other crazy things here on Questing for Adventure.

The online version of the mag is pretty good too. Check it out.

Update: Wow, apparently photobooth shoots images in mirror image, totally didn’t notice that. Creepy.