Greetings from rainy Copenhagen! After a four-hour layover in London (I elaborate more below), I arrived in Copenhagen around 4:30pm. I am happy to have a break from the scorching heat that is conquering New England, but the rain is pretty dreary and not my ideal welcome into a brand new city. However, with that said, I am very happy to relax in the common area of my hostel (which is amazing – will write more about it at the end of my stay) and catch up on blogging while enjoying a Danish craft ale. Plus, I will probably go to sleep at an earlier hour tonight considering I got approximately two hours of sleep, total. Honestly, it’s a miracle that I am even lucid right now.

With this post, I wanted to address something that we have probably all dealt with when traveling to a foreign country – what do we do about our cellphone plan?

As I mentioned, my departure flight from Boston had me connecting through London Gatwick Airport on my way to Copenhagen. Let me just say this right now – connecting trough Gatwick is infinitely less stressful than Heathrow, London’s largest and main international airport. Gatwick’s smaller size makes it much easier to navigate yourself around. However, given that I had a four-hour layover, I searched the Gatwick Airport area on Google Maps to see if there were any towns nearby to which I could escape, and I was thus led to Crawley, a small town that is no more than a 12-minute bus ride away from the airport.

My main reason for visiting Crawley was simply to purchase a European SIM Card for my phone, thus saving me from having to do it in Denmark. Should I have had a flight delay that would have made my layover shorter, I would have just stayed in the airport, as purchasing the SIM in Copenhagen would not have been a big deal, but it was refreshing to just step outside the confines of the airport and perform this whole transaction with someone who speaks the same language as me.

Living in the digital age almost makes it necessary for us to stay connected while we are traveling. Social media aside, as a solo traveler, there is no denying the fact that having access to a working phone puts my parents and the rest of my family at ease. Furthermore, given that all of my reservation information is saved to my phone, I rely on having adequate access to a working network in the event that I need to refer to my stored info. Depending on who your network provider is, you might have various options in having access to a cell phone network and data while traveling abroad. As a Verizon customer, I would have to pay $10 per day in order to utilize roaming data while traveling. If I am gone for a long weekend abroad, I could justify having to pay $40 extra on my monthly bill, but as someone who is away for 30 days, it does not make sense to rack up an additional $300 when I know that there are plenty of better options. That is why I make it my first priority upon arriving to a foreign country to purchase a prepaid SIM card that can be inserted into my phone and will grant me access to phone calls, text messaging, and data. Considering that I am not staying put in one country this time, I needed a plan that would grant me mobile network access to multiple countries throughout Europe at no extra cost. I did some preliminary research and found out that the Three network, the largest mobile network provider in the United Kingdom, offers a multi-country European plan, even for prepaid customers. Therefore, upon arriving to the United Kingdom, I wanted to make it to Crawley in order to visit the local Three store and purchase a prepaid SIM card, so that I would be ready to go even before I arrived at my first destination. I can now say that after spending a mere 10 minutes in the store (if that) and paying only $31 (25 GBP), I now have unlimited calls and texts as well as 12GB of data for the next month!

Mission accomplished 💪🏼