ALLEN PARK, Mich. -- They have been back from London for less than two weeks, haven’t played a game since then and already, the Detroit Lions know they are headed back to Europe for a second straight season.

The experience from beating Atlanta in Week 8 is still so fresh and so familiar that there is a hope that having done this once before -- coincidentally on the same week of the NFL season in 2015 against Kansas City as the Falcons game -- will help the second time around.

With that game still a year away, that is what the Lions are hoping they can take from the 2014 venture to apply to the 2015 trip.

“Just the experience in itself, obviously,” Lions coach Jim Caldwell said. “Once you’ve been through it, you’ve got a sense of it, obviously some adjustments you’d make. We debrief after every trip and try to see areas in which we can improve upon.

“All of that is resources and all of that prep work will assist us in terms of going over and acclimating a bit more quickly.”

Research heading into this year’s game told the Lions to head over Monday night into Tuesday instead of what some road teams do with the London trip, which is head over later in the week. Caldwell wouldn’t commit to that strategy again, but that could be due to the Lions not even fully unpacking their knowledge from this trip yet.

The benefit for Detroit going the second straight year, though, is the information they can now use will be through their own eyes and ears and experiences instead of talking second hand to as many people who have done this before as possible.

“I thought we handled it pretty well,” running back Reggie Bush said. “Obviously, we had one issue with one of our teammates, but other than that, I thought we handled it pretty well. I’ve done the trip before with the Saints, and we handled it well then, and I think we did the same thing here.

“I’m not sure that there is much that needs to be changed, but we can probably improve some little things here and there.”

Lions team president Tom Lewand said something similar Thursday, but didn’t have any specific examples yet. The reason? They are still going through everything from this year’s trip and won’t start truly planning for next year’s game until the 2014 season concludes.

It is, after all, a year away. That is how the players and coaches are thinking about it, anyway.

“It was a cool experience and all,” Lions offensive lineman Travis Swanson said. “But how I think of it is we have so much to do before then that it’s just, not even in my mind.

“I think I just read it and I was like, ‘OK. That’s so long [from now].’ “