This week the Euro summer comes to an end – and so does a certain type of posting on Instagram.

Waiting at the bus stop in the grey winter dawn, a slanting rain soaking your trouser leg, you can warm yourself by scrolling your feed and seeing pictures of Australians enjoying a Euro summer. There it is again – azure Greek coves, plates of barbecued sardines, the yachts rented by the hour, and selfies on the balcony of some Paris Airbnb, drinking wine in the long, blue night.

But this year, just out of the frame but never far away, was the heat. You can’t easily photograph heat but it infused the season so monumentally that it might just have killed the Euro summer dream cold.

With extreme heat starting in late May, this summer broke temperature records in western Europe and made for an uncomfortable travel experience for hundreds of millions of tourists.

Who dreams of having a Euro summer now when staying in an ancient, uncooled building in the Old Town is like trying to sleep in a wood-fired pizza oven? How aspirational and glamorous is it to spend your days in an air-conditioned shopping centre (if you can find one) because to try to see a cathedral or historic site is to risk heatstroke?

To travel to the usual European vacation spots in high season now is to endure. It’s to plan your........

© The Guardian