So here is my travel journal from my backpacking trip to Europe. It's more involved than my day log stuff that's already been up the site. There has been some complaining (you know who you are) that my daylog was rather boring and that it focused too much on the details of transportation. I can't promise that this is less boring, but's there's certainly a hell of lot more of it. Occasional parts of the journal have been omitted to protect the (not-so)innocent. These parts really weren't that common, but hey - use your imagination. Keep in mind that this is a journal and things like punctuation, sentence structure, paragraph breaks, grammar, and spelling may or may not been a part of the writing process. Not to mention my almost criminal use of parenthesis. Like my pictures, the writing is quite erratic as far as consistency of content. The journal style kind of mutates over the course of the trip. Read at your own risk.
 4/28 Cincinnati 4/30 Paris 5/02 Paris 5/03 Paris 5/04 Bayeux 5/06 Toulouse 5/07 Barcelona 5/08 Barcelona 5/09 Madrid 5/11 Salamanca 5/12 Salamanca 5/13 Barcelona 5/14 Portbou 5/15 Narbonne 5/17 Nice 5/18 Venice 5/20 Naples 5/21 Rome 5/22 Rome 5/24 Florence 5/25 La Spezia 5/26 Lucerne 5/29 Interlaken 5/30 Interlaken 6/03 Amsterdam 6/04 London 6/06 Salisbury 6/09 Nottingham 6/11 Edinburgh 6/13 Kyleakin 6/15 Dublin 6/17 Dublin 6/23 Hamburg 6/27 Brussels 6/29 Berlin 7/01 Prague 7/02 Munich 7/03 Munich |
5/11 - Salamanca, Spain Well, I'm not actually in Salamanca, but I will be in a couple of hours. I'm on the train from Madrid. The scenery is really cool, lots of bushy, rocky, rolling hills. Yesterday was kind of a messed up day. I went to the train station, planning to get a ticket for what I thought was an overnight train to Grenada. Turns out that that train had a 3 hour layover in the middle of the night. So in my frustration I decided to head out to the museums and deal with it later (real smart, I know). The Thyssen Bornemisza museum was pretty good, it set up to show a progression of art from medieval times to the present. As a result, the selection seemed kinda skimpy for a lot of the artists. I stopped to get lunch at some random restaurant. I had the a very large, messy club sandwich, which was a bit of a problem, because the provided napkins were basically 3 inch square pieces of wax paper. After cleaning myself up, I headed to the Reina Sofia. This one was more specialized to mostly the 20th century. The best part for me was the Dalí section. I really liked Dalí before, but seeing them up close was amazing. Picasso's Guernica was also very interesting. After that I headed back to the train station. At that point, my choices was getting into either Salamanca (which I was also considering) or Grenada both of them getting in late last night. After trying to get reservations in either city and failing(saturday nights suck), I decided to stay another night in Madrid. Of course most places that looked interesting were full, so I just went for a single anywhere, which was of course somewhere boring. Didn't quite have the motivation to go out solo so I stayed in again. Ah well. This morning, I left early so I could go to this english language bookstore I had the address for. I got there and of course it wasn't open yet. I waited for an hour til 10(when it was supposed to open). Of course in that hour, I finished the book I was reading. At 10:15 I decided I had to go empty handed (still closed) or I would miss my train. Made the train fine, and here I am. |