I crowdsourced travel tips for my 3-month European vacation. I ended up on a stranger's boat shrimping in Norway's fjords.

02.10.2024 - 18:07 / insider.com

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Gabriel Escobar , a 22-year-old actor and social media content creator. It has been edited for length and clarity.

This summer, I traveled to 13 countries in Europe. Eight were planned, and five were not.

I graduated from college in May. I didn't know where I wanted to go, what job I wanted, or where I wanted to live, so I figured I'd go see a bunch of places. That sparked the whole backpacking idea.

I bought a flight to Copenhagen and scheduled my return flight for three months later — the maximum time I could stay in the Schengen zone without a visa.

Three days before my flight, I was sitting in a coffee shop. I took out a piece of paper, scrawled a haphazard map of Europe on the back, and made a rough calendar.

That's how I figured out the first month of my trip.

On this trip, I want to do something different and create a community of people that I could ask for recommendations.

So for each place I went to, I would post on my Instagram and TikTok, asking people for tips on where to go.

Right off the bat, crowdsourcing my itinerary gave me so many new ideas. It also led to most of the coolest things that I did on my trip, which I would have never known about otherwise.

One of my craziest adventures — that I now call my "side quests" on social media — happened during my last few days in Oslo.

I received a direct message from a shrimp company, Færder Sjømat, asking if I wanted to join them on a shrimp boat.

And I replied, saying, "Hey, I would love to do this."

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The night before the shrimping trip, I slept below deck on the boat in a little bunk. And at 3:30 a.m., when it was still pitch black, we set off.

We drove up the fjord for about two hours to the fishing spot, and then, by 6 a.m., we set sail on the trawler for the day.

Behind the boat, a big net scooped shrimp as we sailed. The crew dragged the net up when it was full.

While waiting, I spent a lot of time talking to the father-daughter duo who ran the business, and they told me about their jobs and their lives.

After the net was pulled up, they put me to work. I helped sort the 275 pounds of shrimp and separate them from squids, little fish, and everything else that got pulled up.

The shrimp are cooked on board. We then took a big bowl and sat on the front of the boat, where I was introduced to some traditional Norwegian summer food — toast with mayonnaise, shrimp, and lemon.

It was just me and the two of them on the little boat, so it felt really personal. This was a once-in-a-lifetime moment, and it has become one of my favorite adventures.

Another wild one was