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 |
5/15 - Narbonne, France So the overnight in Portbou wasn't that bad, it was actually quite fun. There was probably a hundred people, mostly backpackers. People set up tents and everything.  I found a place to charge my Treo (there had been no plugs in the room at Kabul) and sat talking to this German girl(living in Nice) named Elena who was charging her phone. Talked to her for several hours til around 2:30 am at which point I joined a card game. We played drinking games (the cafeteria and bar were conveniently open all night, specifically for the occasion) until about 5 or so. Finally the ticket office opened at 6 and we got the news that the trains were running again. We (I had kind of solidified with a group at this point) took the 5 minute train ride across the border to Cerbere. Found out the route we would have to take to get to Nice involved changing trains twice but hey, it meant getting there. So we hopped on a train to Narbonne, where we had a three hour layover before the next train. I ended up playing sentry, setting my alarm and then waking up everyone I knew who was getting off at that point because everyone passed out immediately as soon as we got on the train (something about not having slept). We spent the layover in Narbonne sitting in huge clump in the middle of the lobby. We got yelled at by one of the employees because several of the group were sleeping on the floor. He was going on and on in French but we were somewhat unsympathetic to french railroad employees at this point, so we didn't really do anything about it. There was also a long Tolkien discussion in there somewhere (not involving the french guy). Then the train to Marseille was 30 minutes late (shocking, I know), so we'll have to take a slightly later train to Nice.
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