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 |
7/3 - Munich, Germany Wow, it's my last night in Europe. Protocol tells me I should be blisteringly drunk, going out in style, but I'm not really in a party mood. Instead, I'm lying on my bed not talking to anyone. This isn't really a bad thing, I realized I'm going to have plenty of social interaction over the next week or so, and the one thing I'll probably be lacking is alone time. I've spent more time by myself in the last 2 months than I have in my whole life, and I kinda wanted to savor it for one last evening. I haven't had a completely antisocial night, I just had a really nice dinner with Simone, a German friend of Kirstin's.  Kirstin had insisted I hang out with her, so we met up earlier this evening. My day was fairly uneventful, I sat around at the hostel until around 1 or 2, finishing Bonfire of the Vanities, and waiting for the rain to stop. I went into town, checked my email, and went walking in search of an English language bookstore some guys had told me about last night. Found the store, and ended up buying only one of the books I picked out after seeing the ridiculous prices. After that I went walking through the Englischergarten, a rather large park. I had heard there was a place in there where people surfed on a part of the river, but I never found it. I did manage to get caught in a sudden torrential downpour. I did have an umbrella, but it was no match for the sheer quantity of water, and I was soon soaked. I headed toward the streetcar stop, and in the process managed to get even more soaked by the splash from a passing truck. This pushed me over some sort of edge, because I started loudly singing the chorus of 'Singing in the Rain' a la 'A Clockwork Orange'. Unfortunately no one was around to hear my performance. By the time I got the stop, it had stopped raining, and I arrived just in time to catch the streetcar to meet Simone. We went to an Italian restaurant and had an entertaining conversation. After saying goodbye to her, I went to check my email and the headed back to 'The Tent'. As I walked toward the hostel, it really struck me that this was my last night in Europe, and that really got to me. Hearing the voices around the nightly bonfire, I found myself thinking of this group of complete strangers as representing the world of travellers that I was about to leave. An amusing thought, because up til that point I'd been marvelling at how little sentimentality I'd been feeling about leaving, kind of feeling like it was the right time. I am going to miss it all though.
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